Miami-Dade mayor blames operator for incinerator fire, upending fight for a new one

Douglas Hanks, Miami Herald on Dec 2, 2025

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MIAMI – Nearly three years after a fire shut down Miami-Dade County’s garbage incinerator, a fight over who caused the blaze is rattling a bidding war over how and where to build a modern replacement.

In a Nov. 20 letter, a top deputy to Mayor Daniella Levine Cava demanded the Doral facility’s former operator, Reworld, put up $7.8 million toward the county’s financial losses from the Superbowl Sunday “inferno of garbage” that shuttered the incinerator on Feb. 12, 2023.

The letter from Roy Coley, who oversees the county’s trash operations as Levine Cava’s chief of utilities, ticked off a string of alleged failings by Reworld — a New Jersey-based company known as Covanta when the fire hit. The alleged failings include failure to properly store combustible materials and failure to keep some fire-suppression equipment in working order.

“The initial event which caused the spark on the G1 conveyer, that was allowed to smolder and burn without any action by Covanta … was the direct result of … Covanta’s failure to perform adequate housekeeping and maintenance,” Coley wrote.

Reworld denied doing anything wrong, calling Coley’s allegations “baseless.” The company also faulted Miami-Dade, claiming it ignored needed safety upgrades at the county-owned incinerator.

“The County’s current situation is entirely of its own making,” read the Nov. 25 letter from Scott Holkeboer, a Reworld vice president. “The County has long known that the nearly four decades-old Facility and its major components were at the end of their useful life and required significant and prompt capital investment.”

Bidding war

While the two sides point fingers over fire prevention at a facility that’s been idle for nearly three years, the main impact of the fighting may be on the contest to build Miami-Dade a modern trash-burning plant.

For months, Reworld has been part of a consortium led by Florida Power & Light to win a county contract to construct a new incinerator, which burns trash to make electricity and is often called a “waste-to-energy” plant. The FPL team is now in a head-to-head contest with a rival consortium led by FCC Environmental Services, a trash-processing company based in Madrid.

While that fight continues — county commissioners are expected to consider the two still-confidential proposals at the board’s Dec. 16 meeting — Reworld said it’s no longer in the bidding ring for what could be a $2 billion incinerator project.

After the default letter from Coley, Reworld said FPL notified the company it would no longer be listed as the proposed operator for the consortium’s proposal. In a statement, FPL seemed to confirm Reworld’s assertion, saying a rival incinerator operator out of Switzerland, Kanadevia Inova, would be its partner in the effort.

In his letter, Reworld’s Holkeboer all but accused the Levine Cava administration of tanking Reworld’s effort to run the county’s next incinerator, too.

“The County’s baseless Notice and Demand [letter] is highly troubling because the intent appears to be to defame Reworld and interfere with its business interests,” he wrote.

In an interview, Coley said the demand letter wouldn’t disqualify Reworld from being on a team pursuing a new incinerator project. “It’s very common for a county to have a conflict with a vendor on one job while doing business with them on another,” he said.

Coley also said the timing of the letter was tied to both sides failing to reach an agreement over costs that Miami-Dade wanted Reworld to pay related to lost revenue from electricity sales and clean-up expenses at a shuttered plant that will eventually need to be demolished.

Where will the incinerator go?

By inviting FCC and FPL to propose incinerator plans, Levine Cava and county commissioners are hoping to salvage a process that’s so far failed to clear the significant political hurdles to picking a new spot for a massive trash-burning plant.

For years, the county’s plan was to build a modern incinerator in Doral to replace the 41-year-old one that caught fire in 2023.

Then President Donald Trump, who owns a Doral golf resort, won the 2024 presidential election. Son Eric Trump lobbied Levine Cava and commissioners to pick another site and publicly vowed to fight a Doral incinerator, which requires federal permits to be built.

Commissioners and the mayor ultimately agreed to take Doral off the table as a potential incinerator site, as they did with a county airport in northern Miami-Dade that was opposed by Miramar in neighboring Broward County.

As Miami-Dade hauls its trash north by train and truck to landfills elsewhere in Florida, there’s no preferred site for a future incinerator. Instead, commissioners in October voted to have the FPL and FCC teams propose their own location recommendations.

Those proposals remain confidential but are expected to become public later this month. It’s not known what location or locations the teams may float as part of their incinerator plans.