Doral Back in Play for County Incinerator After Fee Deal Stalls

Doral is back on Miami-Dade County’s list of possible sites for its next waste incinerator, three years after commissioners voted to spare the city if it agreed to negotiate a fee payment to the county. That negotiation never happened. No talks ever started, and the county is now treating Doral as a live option again.

Why it matters

The original vote was supposed to close the door on Doral hosting the plant, not leave it ajar. Instead it attached a condition neither side ever acted on, so the city’s apparent exemption was never more than a handshake waiting on a contract that was never written. Landowners and developers near Doral’s industrial corridor have been building and buying for three years under the assumption the site question was settled. It was not. Every parcel the county could still point to sits in limbo until the fee talks happen or Doral is dropped from the list for good.

The numbers

Three years have passed since commissioners first agreed to exclude Doral conditioned on the city negotiating a fee. In that span, zero negotiating sessions between the city and the county have taken place, and no fee structure has ever been made public. The deal commissioners thought they had struck produced no contract, no payment schedule, and no closed file, just a standing exclusion that was conditional from the start and has stayed unresolved since.

What’s next

Miami-Dade has not set a new deadline for narrowing its incinerator site list, and Doral has not said publicly whether it will restart fee talks with the county. Until a fee is negotiated or the county commits to another location, Doral stays in the pool of sites the county can draw from, alongside other industrial-zoned parcels across South Florida that have faced similar scrutiny. The stalemate leaves the city’s own leverage untested: it agreed to pay to be excluded, then let three years pass without naming a price.