Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s administration will appear before the County Commission to address the Fisher Island fuel depot crisis. Don’t be fooled by the choreography. This isn’t leadership. It’s damage control.
Here is what actually happened, stripped of the spin.
For nearly a century, PortMiami, one of the only major ports in the world without an on-site fueling facility, has depended on a fuel farm on Fisher Island, previously owned by an energy storage company called TransMontaigne. Miami-Dade County was not an outside party. It was a tenant. The county leased that property. It knew the land, knew the lease, and knew the 2027 expiration date was coming.
When TransMontaigne put the property on the market in 2024, the county passed. According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal and the Miami Herald, Miami-Dade made an offer but did not aggressively pursue the acquisition. County officials said they learned about the sale through a news story. A county that was leasing the property found out its landlord was selling through the press. Let that register.
When the county didn’t buy it, a consortium of HRP Group, Related Group, and Raycliff Capital purchased the site for $180 million and announced plans to build luxury condominiums. The price tag to get it back? $400 million, half at closing, half paid over 20 years. The county’s inaction literally doubled the cost of solving a problem it created.
Mayor Levine Cava’s response to this self-inflicted disaster was to force out two of the most respected public servants in Miami-Dade County government. Sources confirm that Chief Operating Officer Jimmy Morales and PortMiami Director Hydi Webb were pushed out amid mounting outrage over the administration’s handling of negotiations, after county leaders had repeatedly assured commissioners that things were under control, right up until they weren’t.
The mayor called it retirement. In his resignation letter, Morales told the mayor directly: “I acknowledge that you and I have a difference of opinion with respect to the purchase and sale transaction of the port fuel facility on Fisher Island.” That is a man who believes he was doing his job and was shown the door anyway.
Neither Morales nor Webb are viewed by anyone in Miami-Dade government as incompetent. Morales is a Harvard Law graduate, former county commissioner, former Miami Beach city manager, and one of the most credentialed administrators this county has ever produced. Webb spent years building PortMiami’s operations into the world-class facility it is today. In the end, it was one fuel depot that sank her. Scapegoating them is not just unfair. It is transparent.
Now, with the eminent domain announcement last week and tomorrow’s commission appearance, Cava’s orbit is pivoting to a new narrative: greedy developers bought critical public infrastructure and are holding the port hostage. Left-leaning influencers have amplified this framing with apparent shock that a private company could purchase something so strategically important. HRP’s CEO Roberto Perez cut through the noise: “The County finds itself in this position as a direct result of its own incompetence after years and frankly decades of failure to plan for PortMiami infrastructure. Seizing private property is not the solution for public failure.”
He’s right. The fuel farm was not public property. It was private land that Miami-Dade leased. When the owner decided to sell, the county had every right and every reason to buy it. It didn’t. A private company then purchased private property in a legal transaction. That is not a scandal. It is the market working exactly as it should and the county arriving late.
This is not even a new problem. As far back as 2013, then-Commission Chairwoman Rebeca Sosa directed the county to study building an on-site fuel farm at PortMiami. The administration found then, as it does now, that building a new facility would be too costly. Translation: this administration inherited a known vulnerability, did nothing, and now wants to point fingers at private enterprise for filling the vacuum.
Whatever is presented at tomorrow’s commission meeting, commissioners should ask one question before anything else: who gave the order to let that sale go by?
Not Jimmy Morales. Not Hydi Webb. They were executing the directives of the chief executive of Miami-Dade County. The same person who will be presenting to the commission tomorrow.
