Miami-Dade’s incinerator hunt is down to just two sites. Will the county start over?

Miami-Dade’s extended quest to build a new garbage-burning incinerator briefly seemed to settle on two remote sites Thursday before commissioners suggested starting the search over to find cheaper land.

Multiple county commissioners said they were aghast at the cost of acquiring either of the privately owned sites for a $2 billion plant to replace the Doral incinerator shut down by a fire in 2023. The pushback wasn’t over the purchase price of up to $78 million that Miami-Dade would need to pay upfront, but the never-ending yearly fees of around $3 million that the landowners want as part of a deal.

“It is disrespectful and insulting to the taxpayers of this county that they are trying to bind their sale to a royalty in perpetuity,” Commission Chair Anthony Rodriguez said during an afternoon workshop dedicated to how to build another incinerator.

Where to build an incinerator has always been the toughest part of a decision that was looming over commission politics well before a fire broke out at the 1981 facility on Super Bowl Sunday three years ago.

The commission seemed close to voting to build a replacement on the same county-owned site in Doral in 2024, but then Donald Trump won back the White House, and his family quickly began warning commissioners and Mayor Daniella Levine Cava they’d oppose a new facility so close to the Trump Doral golf resort.

Then attention shifted to an idle county-owned air strip known as Opa-locka West just south of the Broward County line. That sparked allegations of racism from the nearby city of Miramar, where Black residents are the largest population group.

Commissioners last year voted to eliminate both of the contested sites. Then they invited two private consortiums interested in building the new incinerator to propose their own locations for the county facility, which would generate electricity by burning nearly 2 million tons of trash a year.

Those consortiums — one led by the Spanish waste-management firm FCC Environmental Services and the other by Florida Power and Light — each locked up permission for their preferred incinerator sites. FCC has the option to purchase the 78-acre Ace Truck Parking Yard about a mile outside Hialeah. FPL secured an option for a 65-acre plot of vacant land off Okeechobee Road.

Both locations are surrounded by industrial properties and rock quarries, rather than walking distance to residential communities at the previously suggested Opa-locka and Doral sites. But at Thursday’s session, commissioners for the first time had to publicly confront the higher costs that come with abandoning county-owned locations to go purchase a privately owned one.

That brought up the possibility of scrapping the latest plan to begin the land search again.

“I think one of the things we need to consider is going back to the drawing board and considering county-owned land,” Rodriguez said.

It wasn’t clear by the end of the meeting whether Rodriguez’s comments reflected a negotiating tactic to bring down the asking price of the incinerator sites, or whether there was momentum toward reconsidering Opa-locka West or even Doral. But the talk of restarting the site hunt captured the many logistical, financial and political hurdles standing between the commission and an incinerator ribbon-cutting ceremony.

A bill by a Broward County lawmaker working its way through the Florida Legislature would create a set of environmental rules taking most incinerator sites off the table, but not the ones proposed by FCC and FPL.

While Levine Cava wants a site large enough to house recycling, composting and other waste-management facilities, the larger footprint makes the real estate tab more expensive.

If commissioners vote to build a new incinerator, a sizable chunk of the construction tab ultimately will get added to the more than 340,000 homes that currently pay about $700 per year for county trash service.

“How is it in the best interest of the taxpayers to buy a private piece of property when we have land we own currently within our own portfolio?” asked Commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins.

For now, FCC and FPL are moving forward with their proposals. They’ve agreed to cooperate in creating a joint bid for the county incinerator deal, with commissioners expected to approve legislation on Feb. 18 instructing Levine Cava to negotiate a preliminary agreement with the two companies.

That deal would come back to the commission in the spring, with the two companies planning to settle on a final site and development plan before a final vote in November. Construction would begin in 2029, with the incinerator running five years later, a moment that would allow the county to stop hauling all of its garbage to landfills across Florida.

That’s assuming the timeline doesn’t get trashed by a new fight over incinerator locations.

“We’ve lost way too much time,” Commissioner Roberto Gonzalez said. “Wasting more time is going to cost taxpayers more money.”

This story was originally published February 12, 2026 at 6:01 PM.