The Miami-Dade Commission talked about garbage this week. Not the usual garbage. Real garbage.
Mayor Daniella Levine Cava has suggested a $36 annual garbage fee increase — or $3 a month — as part of her 2023-2024 $11.6 billion budget. To keep the current $509 annual fee would mean a cut in services, she said. But county commissioners, who approved her tiny. fake tax cut — a millage decrease that doesn’t actually cut anyone’s taxes — balked and deferred making any decision until Sept. 6.
That could include dropping curbside pick-up from twice to once a week and/or scrapping weekly recycling altogether.
The problem with recycling is that we do it wrong. It’s become a drain rather than a revenue stream because we contaminate our plastic with soap scum, our cans with tuna juice and our cardboard with pizza grease. The flimsy plastic grocery bags we’re supposed to reuse, not recycle, get stuck in the machine and break it. “We now have to pay the vendor,” said Olga Espinosa-Anderson, who became the solid waste director after Mike Fernandez resigned with a five-page memo that raised alarms.
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In a July 3 letter, Fernandez warned that the loss of the incinerator that burned down in a February fire could mean no more disposal capacity in five years, and he recommended a building construction moratorium as soon as next year unless alternative solutions could be identified and implemented,
Levine Cava has tried to pooh-pooh those concerns and said things are not as bad as Fernandez said. But commissioners also talked about a potential moratorium on development if something isn’t done.
“We have reached a crossroads with solid waste,” said Commissoner Rene Garcia.
Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera wanted to stop county recycling right there, at the meeting, to immediately save $22 million of the $40 million shortfall in lieu of the fee increase. But the item wasn’t noticed that way and other commissioners said they wanted to have a more “robust” conversation about it in September. Can anybody imagine if they had cancelled the recycling without letting anybody from the public comment on it first?
There were others who also wanted to take care of it this week and pass the fee hike. After all, it’s just the first of several years’ worth of fee hikes needed to bridge the gap.
“The people who sat up here for decades didn’t acknowledge the cost of providing the service,” said Chairman Oliver Gilbert. “There’s never a good time to raise a fee.
“We are kicking the same can down the same road the same way the people before us did, even though we said we were going to be different,” Gilbert said.
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Commissioner Keon Hardemon also said the fee needed to be increased so services (read: jobs) would not be cut. “The organization that needs our support right now is the department that picks up our trash,” he said, suggesting the county eliminate the $2.5 million budgeted for prosecuting illegal dumping cases. “Maybe that’s not something we do this year,” Hardemon said.
But what about next year? And the year after that? Isn’t that the definition of kicking the can? And it’s no solution at all if illegal dumping proliferates.
Commissioner Raquel Regalado was right: There are options.
Perhaps customers could choose. Pay extra fees to get twice a week pick-up and keep fees the same to go once a week. Maybe seniors on a fixed income could be exempted.
And people could be taught to recycle correctly. They could be given an incentive, like discounts on their property taxes or garbage fees. That could help encourage them to rinse out their Starfish cans.
Regalado is also starting a composting project in her district that could be expanded to decrease the waste tonnage that is collected each year. This is something else that the county could encourage homeowners to do.
But if we want to be a world-class city, like commissioners are always saying they want to be, then we can’t altogether cancel recycling.
Miami-Dade County could raise garbage fees, suspend recycling service added by Ladra on
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