UPDATE: Sept. 15, 2023: Following its initial vote, the Miami-Dade County Board of Commissioners reopened the fee increase issue and voted on two additional increase proposals at their Sept. 6 meeting. The first such proposal, to increase the fee by $116, also failed. Another proposal to increase the fee by $38, with additional funding for other waste measures, passed. County Board Chair Oliver Gilbert III voted in favor of the winning proposal.
Dive Brief:
- Sept. 7: In a 7-6 vote, the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners voted down a proposed solid waste fee hike on Wednesday that would have kicked in Oct. 1 and plugged a roughly $40 million budget shortfall.
- The vote occurred at a meeting that included public testimony and discussion among board members about the county's current solid waste system. Commissioners urged the mayor's office to provide a comprehensive solid waste plan so they could make long-term decisions, rather than a “piecemeal approach,” as Commissioner Raquel Regalado described the fee vote at the meeting.
- The board also deferred a decision on approving the mayor’s selection of a preferred site for a new mass burn incinerator to a Sept. 19 meeting. County Board Chair Oliver Gilbert III said he wanted discussion of the fee and a solid waste plan “on and through and off this dais” by the conclusion of that meeting.
Dive Insight:
The Department of Solid Waste Management’s fiscal challenges were made worse earlier this year when a waste-to-energy facility owned by the county and run by Covanta was largely destroyed by a fire. Replacing that facility’s capacity is expected to be costly and only partially funded with insurance money, which must be claimed in a relatively short timeframe.
Compounding the issue, the county has only sporadically increased residents’ disposal fee in recent years, forcing the board to find money elsewhere in the budget to cover the rising costs of gas, labor and equipment for its waste and recycling services, Gilbert said at the meeting.
“When you don't see those increases baked into the system, you know that we are finding creative ways to subdue the cost. Time has run out on that,” Gilbert said. “What I would prefer is that we have actual solutions that actually solve it and not have us talk about the same thing next year.”
Residents currently pay $509 annually for waste services, and the fee hike that Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava proposed would have added an additional $36. But Gilbert noted that the increase would not fully cover the shortfall in the Department of Solid Waste Management’s budget.
Commissioners proposed various solutions to that shortfall. The department has been working toward implementing a plan to begin providing commercial waste services to county facilities, earning revenue through the waste fees paid by libraries, firehouses and others. Interim Director Olga Espinosa-Anderson told the county on Wednesday that the department had ordered new equipment for that initiative, but it wouldn’t arrive until 2025.
Regalado, who chairs the county board’s infrastructure committee, also noted that the county has improved recycling contamination by 10% since it began an education campaign earlier this year. If the county improves its contamination rate, it can renegotiate its recycling contracts and potentially agree to a lower fee, according to Regalado.
The commissioner expressed disappointment that the board had only received a memo from the mayor’s office in recent weeks rather than a full solid waste plan. She said such a plan would help the board gain a fuller understanding of the costs it needs to fund, and that voting for an increase on Wednesday wouldn’t get commissioners closer to tackling the issue.
Miami-Dade County is also facing a lack of disposal capacity following a fire that shut down its incineration plant in February, which previously handled roughly half the county’s waste. In addition to rising collection fees, the county must also finance new facilities or programs that can handle disposal for the 2.4 million tons of solid waste processed and disposed of there each year.
Doral residents testified during the public comment period at the meeting, many in support of the mayor’s memo broadly, which mentioned her office’s intent to develop a zero waste plan. But the plans for a new incinerator also drew criticism from some Doral residents, as well as environmental activists and Miramar Mayor Wayne Messam.
Messam lodged his disapproval of the Miami-Dade mayor’s proposed incinerator site at the decommissioned Opa Locka West Airport, which is roughly a mile from the Broward County town he leads. Sebastian Caicedo, the Miami regional director for environmental group Florida Rising, also urged the county board not to “put the burden of 40-plus years of a new incinerator in another community.” His group has previously urged the county to put the estimated $1.2 billion needed to build a new incinerator toward zero waste strategies that don’t involve landfilling or incineration.
Jennifer Moon, the chief of policy and budgetary affairs for the county board, told commissioners during the meeting that the county would have to look at its base charge to ensure it could cover all the expenses they now have.
“The fire that happened just exacerbated an issue that already existed, which is that the system was already out of balance. Because the fees hadn't been adjusted, the expenses were outpacing the revenues,” Moon said.
Commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins said the board needs to find a way to inject predictability into the rate-setting process, floating the possibility of tying the solid waste fee to the consumer price index to ensure expenses could be met from year to year. She also said decision-making was difficult without a comprehensive master plan.
“Year after year we keep doing the same thing in that we keep anticipating a plan for ways to do it different and every time we're up against a vote with no actual plan that we can rely upon,” Cohen Higgins said at the meeting. “I cannot continue to do the same thing and be in the same position next year.”
