Miami-Dade Commission Considers Two Plans for New Incinerator

Everyone needs to dispose of their trash, but no one wants a waste dump or incinerator in their backyard.

About three years after a fire destroyed an incinerator in Doral that processed about half of Miami-Dade’s garbage, the Miami-Dade County Commission may want to build a new one in an industrial area near the Broward County line.

There are two teams competing to build a replacement facility, and both kept their hopes alive on Tuesday after commissioners voted to consider a combined proposal from those teams. Both teams proposed building their incinerators in an area off Okeechobee Road, south of the Broward County line, which is not as close to an old airport that the county once had picked as the preferred incinerator site.

Both teams are counting on some bigtime support. One has Florida Power and Light, a powerful utility that has been involved with many Miami-Dade projects. The other has MasTec, the national infrastructure company based in Coral Gables. The company’s owners, Jose and Jorge Mas, are David Beckham’s partners in the Inter Miami soccer team.

The two teams submitted competing bids for an incinerator expected to cost at least $2 billion to build. One bid has FPL as the lead proposer, while the other comes from MasTec partner FCC Environmental Services, a waste-management company based in Spain.

FPL has an option to purchase a privately owned 65-acre parcel east of Okeechobee Road, between Northwest 178th Street and Northwest 182nd Street. The FCC did not provide a specific site but company representatives said they would build their incinerator somewhere in that “Okeechobee corridor.”

Rather than selecting one company, Commission Chair Anthony Rodriguez said he wanted the commission to receive a unified proposal from both teams. Other commission members agreed, approving Rodriguez’s last-minute legislation to request that the two teams negotiate a joint proposal in time for the board’s Jan. 21 meeting.

Before the vote, Rodriguez said the commission might not be able to come to agreement. Without a joint proposal, Rodriguez said the commission would move on to picking one of the proposals and resolve the question of whether Miami-Dade actually wants another incinerator in a prolonged fight that has involved the Trump family.

After a fire shut down the incinerator in 2023, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava declined to authorize repairs to reopen it. The first plan was to build a modern replacement on the site’s campus in Doral, but that fell apart after President Donald Trump won the election. The Trump family owns a golf resort in Doral, and son Eric Trump promised to fight a new Doral incinerator, a project that would require the approval of federal environmental regulators.

The commissioners considered the former Opa-locka West airport near Miramar. Residents of Miramar complained and promised a lawsuit. The commission voted against both sites from consideration as incinerator locations.

Mayor Levine Cava then said Miami-Dade doesn’t need a new incinerator and recommended the continued use of trucks and trains to haul the county’s garbage to landfills throughout Florida.

Her administration found that the cost of building an incinerator would mean higher rates for homeowners paying Miami-Dade for garbage service. A recent memo from the mayor’s office predicted that the current $702 yearly rate for garbage service would increase to as much as $1,300 a year in a decade with a new incinerator, compared to an increase to $995 without one.

Environmental groups are also opposed to an incinerator. Florida Rising, a progressive group, wants the county to invest in recycling and composting instead of building a new incinerator.