On Tuesday, there will be a workshop with Mayor Levine Cava and the county commissioners to discuss the issue.
After nearly two years of Miami-Dade County considering locations for its new billion-dollar incinerator, the county is going back to square one.
Mayor Daniella Levine Cava has now decided against pushing for a waste-to-energy plant or incinerator.
"As time went by, we saw the cost estimate escalate. We looked at the resistance. We looked at the environmental concerns," Levine Cava told NBC6 on Monday.
In a memo released on Saturday, Levine Cava discussed the challenges involved in waste management and understood the importance of finding a solution after the Resource Recovery Facility in Doral was burned down in February of 2023.
"Ultimately, the least expensive site to rebuild would have been Doral, the existing site but it was not large enough, really for all of the things we want to do with a waste campus," Levine Cava said Monday.
Levine Cava, in her memo, is "recommending that we continue to long haul waste via truck and rail using our contracted capacity, while we continue exploring options to build a landfill outside of Miami-Dade County."
She also explained how the building of any new site will be costly and will be opened to potential legal challenges.
"We knew that resistance would add time to the process and time is money," the mayor told NBC6. "We also were disappointed that people were not more open to understanding what we had come to understand after two years of research."
The proposal for the building of the incinerator has been met with controversy. Several activists have denounced the idea, asking for different solutions to avoid garbage dumps and incinerators.
Back in November, Levine Cava recommended placing the new incinerator at the same site that burned down.
Levine Cava's plan were met with criticism by President Donald Trump's son, Eric Trump, who met with Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez and told him he called the mayor to voice his concerns about keeping the incinerator in Doral, where Trump National Doral is located.
"I'm not saying we will never participate in an incinerator. It's just, this is not the moment to build it," said Comissioner Raquel Regalado. "Financially it's not the moment and from an environmental perspective, it's not the moment."
On Tuesday, there will be a workshop with Levine Cava and the county commissioners to discuss the issue.