Many are wondering what will happen to the property where Covanta, Doral’s garbage recycling plant is located, which had been on fire for several days. And it is that the uncertainty is growing about what will be the fate of the waste plant, since Doral does not want it in the city, nor its neighbors, so the decision is in the hands of Miami-Dade County .
More than a week after the Covanta fire, the smoke that sometimes still emanates from the destroyed structure, doubts about the future of the factory are increasing and questions are being asked.
The Doral community speaks without an iota of doubt and with a single desire.
“Let them close it permanently. And don’t build the new one either. In other words, we would be left without any other waste treatment plant in Doral,” said Raúl Undrenga, a resident of the city.
Smell, air quality and excess trucks in the streets of Doral, it is the long-standing claim of the inhabitants.
“The height of the ash hill where they burn the garbage is already above the houses,” say some, who insist on having a community without a garbage factory, while city officials say they support the demand.
Christi Fraga, mayor of Doral, ensures “to keep in mind that as a city, we would like to be moved from the region”.
On Tuesday evening, the Doral Neighborhood Coalition recalled in a webinar that last year they discussed alternatives to prevent the county from giving the plant a new location, on land across the street. where it had been operating until now, but they say the commissioners ignored their request.
Ivette González Petcovich, a lawyer for the Doral Neighborhood coalition, explains that “the commission did not have the right to vote on an issue on which it published a report, it could not make a decision on the issue of the report during the same meeting, they must have had another meeting”.
This is why in September 2022, the coalition filed a lawsuit against the county because it considers this vote by the commission to be illegal.
“With the support of the community, and with a judge who sees this as a legal issue and not a political one, I think we will have victory,” warns González Petcovich.
So far, the coalition has collected signatures from 6,400 people calling for the Covanta plant to be moved out of the city limits. Position supported by Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermúdez, former mayor of Doral and resident of the community.
For the Miami-Dade commissioner, everything “was bad government in my opinion,” Bermúdez said. “First of all, it’s not democracy, it didn’t give the community the opportunity to express itself and in my opinion it didn’t give some of my colleagues the right to express themselves on a decision as complicated as, if we are going to have a new site at the cost of a trillion dollars, which is not made in two minutes”.
El comisionado Bermúdez también dijo que la decisión sobre la nueva planta a deep debate in la comisión del condado y que Doral tiene sectors donde se podría construir sin que esto represents un problema para los vecinos, como dijo, es algo que “sucede desde hace so much time”.