Adopt mayor’s vital waste plan now, with one major option

Miami-Dade is in a bind trying to find an economical, environmentally sound way to dispose of its solid waste before it hits a ceiling that will prevent further development countywide.

The county each year must get state certification that it has at least five-year disposal capacity, a rule that cannot be waived. The county, which relies on taxes that development creates, is nearing certification failure.

In a community in which property development has long been king, a development moratorium would be an economic disaster. We may not like everything that growth brings with it, but we’d like it even less without that growth.

Waste disposal is not a topic that rolls off our lips over dinner or in casual chats. It’s like the issues of water and sewer capacity and our needs for the future: we just ignore them until they engulf us.

So we ignored those pipes running under our streets until the federal government stepped in and we had to agree to a consent order to upgrade our capacity and make it environmentally safe.

Now, it has taken a February fire that knocked out the Doral plant that processed more than half of this county’s solid waste – well over a million tons of waste with nowhere to go.

The county of necessity pieced together a costly and highly temporary answer while it scrambles for a longer-run solution, a task that commissioners tossed into the lap of Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. We waited for an answer, which just arrived.

That answer is complex. It’s also sensible, serious and can succeed if it clears a number of hurdles beyond the mayor’s control, beginning with a buy-in from commissioners.

Commissioners at this point have little choice but to follow the mayor’s lead. Time is tighter than tight. Even the mayor’s plan offers alternatives that she doesn’t like but might be necessary if state and federal regulators and funders don’t buy into all of her conclusions. We do question one of those conclusions, which would bar private trash plant ownership and thus rule out some potential solutions. We’ll get to that in a bit.

But first, the key and most welcome recommendation, which immediately brought cheers from Doral leaders, is to target a new waste plant not where commissioners last voted to build it right where the old one is in Doral but at a former airport at Krome Avenue and US 27 that hasn’t been used in 15 years and is farther from any residences than is the Doral site.

Hedging her bets, the mayor said the county should try simultaneously to win state and federal approvals also for two alternates, one in Medley and the other being the current Doral site. Doral, her memo notes, would be the easiest place to get approval to build although it’s her third choice.

The mayor says wherever the plant is built it could be outsourced to a private operator to run. But, she stressed, the plant should be county owned.

We’re not convinced that the county must own the plant. Could private owners get the plant built and in operation for less money, or faster? After all, the mayor is estimating a decade before the county could do it. Don’t unnecessarily limit the county’s options.

In her 67-page memo to commissioners, Mayor Levine Cava says no to private owners for five reasons:

1. The county’s $34 million in solid waste revenue bonds prohibit private owners because the disposal system’s revenues are pledged to repay the bonds and a private operation would compete with the county for those revenues. But she also wants to pay off those bonds now to prevent future conflicts with her long-term solid waste strategies. If that is done as she wishes, that barrier to private ownership would disappear.

2. She’s not sure that insurance proceeds of up to $200 million for the fire that destroyed the Doral plant could be used by a private firm building a new waste plant. Before ruling it out, why doesn’t the county ask?

3. She isn’t sure that either state or federal funding that could pay 30% or 40% of the costs of a new plant would be available to a private owner. Is there a reason the county can’t find that answer either?

4. Mayor Levine Cava wants the county to retain its ability to adopt a local ordinance to require the flow of waste to the county-owned facilities. The county doesn’t have such an ordinance but she wants to retain the option, just in case. Is “just in case” more important than dealing with mounting trash in the next decade?

5. Finally, she wants the county to control prices for waste disposal. This year the county is looking at raising garbage fees $36 a year to everyone, with the mayor’s aim to quickly convert trash collection costs into a future property tax that would have the rich pay more than the poor. That way, government could raise waste taxes whenever it wanted to. Is that planned tax the real reason not to consider a private trash plant owner?

Mayor Levine Cava may be right: public ownership might be far better than letting a private company build and operate a solid waste plant. But the reasons she presents are shaky. Before the commission bars private ownership, it should demand firmer answers than a list of “maybes”.

The proposal for handling trash has many moving parts. Location, costs and ownership of a trash plant and the future of taxation to pay for it are only some of them.

The mayor calls for finding 1 million annual tons of private landfill disposal capacity, expanding the North Dade Landfill and analyzing expansion of the South Dade Landfill even as she is looking longer term at getting rid of all landfills within the county.

She also doesn’t want to shut down the Doral waste plant site but to repurpose it, maybe as a transfer station if the Northwest Dade airport site is used for the next solid waste plant, a mulching plant or other solid waste uses.

Meanwhile, to get state and federal permits for a new waste plant the county must create a program to collect and recycle material recovered from the institutional, commercial and industrial sectors, have a waste reduction program for yard trash, and set up a county program to procure products with recycled contents.

With all those moving parts, the mayor again stated her aim for a Zero Waste Master Plan to divert 90% or more of waste from landfills and incinerators, a program that will be much harder to achieve than solving the conundrum we now face with trash disposal.

The county commission needs to buy into the basics of Mayor Levine Cava’s program very soon, because any other choice leads to disaster. But it should be very careful before it rules out private trash plant ownership as one possible solution to a difficult dilemma. Without valid reasons, why not consider private ownership too?