Dive Brief:
- Commissioners in Miami-Dade County, Florida, on Wednesday approved a measure directing the county mayor to solicit and review long-term waste disposal proposals from the private sector. The mayor will have 120 days to analyze the information, including the costs and challenges associated with building a waste-to-energy facility or pursuing landfill capacity expansion.
- The resolution follows a series of memos issued by Mayor Daniella Levine Cava that first recommended WTE before switching to a landfill-only recommendation. The county's decades-old resource recovery facility in Doral burned down in 2023, prompting the need to identify new capacity.
- The commissioners expect to discuss the findings of the mayor's report at a meeting in late July, at which time they may vote on their chosen long-term disposal path.
Dive Insight:
While Florida remains a friendly state to the WTE industry, Miami-Dade County has struggled to identify a location for a new facility. The county had previously agreed to build a new one at the site of its facility in Doral, but commissioners reopened the conversation after that facility’s destruction.
The county’s waste disposal capacity remains an ongoing challenge, as it generates waste at a rate nearly double the national average. Commissioner Raquel Regalado has introduced a variety of measures to improve diversion rates in recent months, including a recycling pilot in airports and seaports and a resolution exploring shipping organics via rail to composting sites.
As an interim measure, the county has also contracted for additional landfill space. That includes new agreements with WM and Waste Connections that substantially grew contracted capacity to more than 3 million tons. But Miami-Dade County’s publicly owned landfills are running out of space, and any long-term disposal route without WTE would require a new landfill, possibly sited in Central Florida, according to the mayor’s memo.
While commissioners expressed urgency in making a decision, they noted their actual deadline is February 2026, when insurance proceeds from the Doral facility’s destruction must be claimed and allocated.
The commissioners also expressed skepticism over the mayor’s recommendations. Her most recent memo that encouraged landfilling came after pressure from a range of stakeholders who oppose a new WTE facility, including from the mayor of Miramar in nearby Broward County and from the Trump family, which opposes a new Doral facility.
Commissioner Keon Hardemon urged his fellow county board members to ignore that stakeholder pressure when deciding a path forward, noting construction on the facility wouldn’t be complete until after the president’s term ends.
“If he decides to put his thumb on the ability for us to create energy consumption options for our community, then let that be a constitutional test of his authority,” Hardemon said during the meeting.
Several paths forward remain possible for the county, including a new WTE facility in Doral, a northwest corner of the county’s developable area or elsewhere. In addition to conversations with landfill operators WM and Waste Connections, the county has previously contracted with Arcadis to analyze disposal options and negotiated with Reworld, which ran the Doral facility.
County commissioners did not elect to release a formal request for proposals. Board Chair Anthony Rodriguez said such a move was unnecessary because the relevant companies were already paying attention at the meeting. Instead, he called for private companies to reach out to the mayor’s office with unsolicited proposals. Rodriguez said if companies don’t reach out, “they’re not in the game.”
“You have a week to reach out to the administration. And the administration, you guys have a week to start these conversations, because it'll take time,” Rodriguez said at the meeting.
