Mayor Levine Cava poses dilemma: raise garbage fees 21% or borrow millions

In an election year, Miami-Dade faces either raising garbage collection fees 21% or borrowing $39 million to fill the budget hole.

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava dumped that bad news on commissioners last week. The choice is theirs. She recommended keeping rates flat and borrowing.

After three of 11 commissioners present voted against advancing legislation to adopt waste assessment rolls and rates for the year starting Oct. 1, assuming ‘yes’ meant the county would keep rates flat and borrow as the mayor wants, Chairman Oliver Gilbert III said the ultimate ‘yes’ vote just allows commissioners to choose later.

“The only way the rate wouldn’t be flat is for this item to move forward,” he said. “If this item hadn’t moved forward, those of you who think a flat rate is a bad idea would have actually had the flat rate by default.”

The public hearing on the options is July 16.

Households in unincorporated areas now pay $547 on property tax bills. The commission must decide which way to go – keep the rate flat or raise it to $661 – in time for Property Appraiser Pedro Garcia to put the actual charge on Truth in Millage notices and then on tax bills.

The 1,200-member Solid Waste Management department collects garbage twice a week, with two bulky pickups yearly and seven-day access to 13 trash and recycling centers and every second week curbside recycling pickup. The department also handles mosquito control countywide.

The mayor said inflation will leave a $39 million gap that she wants to fill by borrowing from the county’s Disposal Fund for the coming year but acknowledges that collection fees still must rise in subsequent years.

She cites the need to hold the rate flat “to continue to provide relief to residents given the increased cost of living.”

But the mayor also acknowledges future financial pressure on the waste department as the county tries to replace the now-closed Doral incinerator that handled the bulk of garbage “to meet our disposal capacity requirement.” Failure to meet capacity could legally strangle future county development.

In a memo last August, the mayor recommended the commission raise the fee from $509 to $545 for the current year that began Oct. 1. Even with the increase, she wrote, the county would need a $26.8 million loan to cover costs of waste disposal for the year.

Waste collection fees in the area the county serves didn’t budge from $439 a year from 2006 to 2017, then rose to $464, followed by a hike to $484 in 2019-2020, the mayor wrote then. To meet the full cost of the current year, the rate would have had to rise to $625, the mayor said.

The county’s Department of Solid Waste Management serves 353,000 households in a 320-square-mile area.

In seeking higher fees last year, the mayor laid out the twice-weekly waste disposal charges per household in some areas that Miami-Dade’s department doesn’t serve.

While the county was charging $509 per household, her figures showed, Coral Gables, which has its own waste collection system, received $938. The cost in Hialeah was $438, in Homestead $534, the City of Miami $640, Fort Lauderdale $571, and unincorporated Broward County $350.

Mayor Levine Cava noted last week that to save money the county has ordered for December delivery four front-end-loading garbage truck to service county departments and begin a multi-year shift to hiring its own staff, and it is looking at eliminating “unnecessary garbage routes.”