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.

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