Miami-Dade dumps chairs for Broward, Palm Beach on solid waste team

Written by Miami Today on June 10, 2026

Miami-Dade got a new solid waste advisory board last week after commissioners agreed to remove from the board seats that had been reserved for experts from neighboring Palm Beach and Broward counties.

The legislation also weathered one commissioner’s complaint that the advisory board wouldn’t be grounded in the reality of what Miami-Dade is doing to deal with solid waste and would itself become a waste of time and energy that would distract from difficult issues at hand.

The county today is wrestling with who will replace Miami-Dade’s incinerator that burned out three years ago and where to put a new one. The advisory board is to deal with that and other solid wase issues over the next five years.

Among dilemmas René García’s proposal for an advisory board cited were dealing with rapidly filling landfills and the specter of meeting state demands to show solid waste capacity as a prerequisite for issuing development permits in our growth-driven economy.

But the plan ran into initial opposition from Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez, who acknowledged the value of regionalism but said he hadn’t seen cooperation on solid waste in the past from either Broward or Palm Beach County.

“I haven’t seen a really valid discussion of how to work together” in what has been “a very divisive issue for Miami-Dade County,” Mr. Bermudez said. Having the other counties participate in solid waste advice, he said, “could impact our constituents in the pocketbook.”

Mr. Bermudez said he would vote against creating the advisory board for that reason. Asked by Mr. García if he would vote in favor without the participation of the other counties, he shifted positions and supported creation of the board.

Not so Commissioner Raquel Regalado. “I have a lot of issues with the item,” she said, and the county commission has all the solid waste advice it needs, including a solid waste master plan that the county paid for that hasn’t been brought to the commission as more than an exhibit and that nobody has dug deeply into.

“Before we create yet another group of people to talk about solid waste,” she said, the commission should discuss the information it already has in a committee meeting or workshop. The advisory board, she said, will submit ideas that are “disconnected from our current reality” because members are not familiar with “the policy decisions that have been made by this board.”

“We create a committee, we waste people’s time, everybody has to attend, and then some report comes back to us and we put it in a drawer … and we never really effectuate on it,” Ms. Regalado said.

Mr. García said he was trying for a regional approach and Palm Beach County has done groundbreaking work on its own solid waste issues that Miami-Dade could draw upon.

“It’s taken us three years to come up with a decision” on a replacement for the incinerator, he said. “We haven’t been able to do that with the incinerator. I think we’re getting close.”

Cost of a new waste-to-energy plant, its scope and when it could open are still up in the air, as is whether two firms can agree on working together or they will compete for a county contract.

But Sen. García’s legislation was broader than just the incinerator. It pointed out that the county also operates three landfills and three regional transfer stations and processes and disposes of 2.4 million tons of solid waste annually, including from 15 cities with which the county has long-term disposal contracts.

After the plant in Doral burned three years ago, the legislation noted, the need to handle the bulk of waste in other ways “has compressed the timeline in which the county’s landfills reach full capacity, with the North Dade and South Dade landfills projected to reach capacity in 2026 and 2030, respectively.”

The aim of the advisory board, the legislation said, is to help the commission develop a strategy to deal with the issue in a “holistic, comprehensive, and long-term waste management solution that is both financially and environmentally sustainable.”