Two months after her plan to build a new garbage incinerator came under attack by President Donald Trump’s son, Miami-Dade’s mayor is dropping her longtime fight for a new trash-burning facility and instead wants the county to explore building a new landfill somewhere else in Florida.

In a weekend memo, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava explained why she says hauling trash out of the county makes more sense than replacing the Doral incinerator that was burning almost half of the garbage collected by county trucks before the facility burned down in early 2023 at its longtime site in Doral.

While a new incinerator would be a workable solution, Levine Cava wrote in her Saturday memo that “the costs of building and maintaining a new facility are extremely high, and any site selected would likely generate legal or other challenges that would significantly extend the project timeline. This decision also comes at a time of mounting pressure on our County’s overall budget.”

Miami-Dade has already spent millions on waste-management consultants to help navigate those obstacles, which have been part of the incinerator calculation from the start. Environmental groups have urged Levine Cava to abandon the incinerator plan in favor of waste reduction, but the mayor had previously said other options endangered the county trash system’s ability to keep up with planned growth.

There appeared to be the votes on the Miami-Dade commission to build a modern replacement of the incinerator on the same location in Doral, until Eric Trump, who runs the president’s hospitality business, came out against the plan days after his father won the 2024 election. The incinerator site sits about 3 miles from the Trump National Doral, a golf resort owned by the president.

In a brief interview with the Miami Herald on Jan. 15, Eric Trump predicted the Doral incinerator push was all but dead.

“We will fight it,” he said after winning zoning approval of a resort expansion before the Doral City Council. “I’m not even sure we will have to. … I think a lot of the support to rebuild it, frankly, has been lost.”

Levine Cava last recommended rebuilding the incinerator in Doral on Nov. 22, writing that she “firmly believes” the location was the best for Miami-Dade.

She backed off that recommendation at the same time that Eric Trump got involved, telling him in a phone call on Nov. 25 that she would ask for a delay on a planned commission vote on that recommendation in order to consider other alternatives — including landfill options that some environmental groups were urging her to pursue.

Her latest memo outlines a new recommended path forward: using trucks and trains to haul garbage out of the county, then burying it in landfills. That includes the existing network of private landfills Miami-Dade pays to use and the possibility of a new one the county hopes to build somewhere in Central Florida.

In her memo, Levine Cava said county staff have identified about 150 acres to build a $556 million landfill within 10 years. That’s far less than the $1.5 billion the county planned to spend on the new incinerator. But operating costs are higher.

The Levine Cava memo states that operating costs for the landfill will run about $163 million a year, compared to the $15 million yearly operating cost for a modern Doral incinerator identified in a 2023 county consultant’s report.

The memo outlines three options for the commission to explore as the board prepares for a special meeting on the incinerator issue on Jan. 28. The options she offered: continue using trucks and trains to ship county trash to landfills outside Miami-Dade; build a new county landfill in Central Florida; and build a new incinerator somewhere in Miami-Dade.

Her memo leads off with a recommendation that only involves hauling trash to landfills: “I am recommending that we continue to longhaul waste via truck and rail using our contracted capacity, while we continue exploring options to build a landfill outside of Miami-Dade County.”

Ken Russell, a former city of Miami commissioner who now is a lobbyist for the local Sierra Club, said the environmental advocacy group “is very excited about the mayor’s recommendation.” He recently returned from a visit to Austin, Texas, where a landfill uses advance technology to reduce odors and environmental impact.

“We would really like to help the county recognize there is a new version of landfilling that is different from what we’ve seen in the past,” Russell said.

Miami-Dade Commissioner Raquel Regalado said Saturday that she thought the incinerator plan had gotten too expensive based on current financials. She pointed out the county has been shipping most of its trash on trucks and trains to landfills across Florida since the incinerator fire two years ago. The option of Miami-Dade owning its own out-of-county landfill will help with costs.

“Right now, it makes financial sense,” she said. “This is a solution for now.”

This is Levine Cava’s third recommendation on what to do after the February 2023 incinerator fire, which shuttered a facility that had been operating since the 1980s. In August 2023, she recommended building a replacement in an abandoned county airfield near the Broward County line, which drew a promise to sue from nearby Miramar.

Juan Carlos Bermudez, the Miami-Dade commissioner who represents Doral, has been fighting the effort to rebuild the incinerator there. On Saturday, he offered cautious praise of the mayor’s memo.

“I am reviewing it,” he said. “In general, I think it is positive.”

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