MIRAMAR CONTRACTOR UNDER SCRUTINY BY CONSERTIVE NEWS SITE

10/23/2025

Online news outlet Florida’s Voice (FV) published an article Monday claiming “questions are being raised about a recent contractor hired by the City of Miramar for his connections to organizations with extreme anti-Israel views,” and “lack of academic credentials,” although it remains unclear who might be raising such questions other than FV founder and CEO Brendon Leslie. The contractor at issue is Michael Ewall of the Energy Justice Network (EJN), a grassroots organization which advocates the “complete phase-out of nuclear power, fossil fuels, large hydroelectric dams and ‘biomass’… within the next 20 years.” Ewall was principal author of the July 2025 whitepaper, “Correcting the Record: Scientific Findings on Trash Incinerator Health Impacts,” which the City of Miramar commissioned to assess the health risks of close residential proximity to trash incinerators.

According to the article, an FV “investigation” unearthed multiple hyperlinks on the organization’s webpage directing site traffic to “extreme organizations and published viewpoints.” The links include a series of 9/11 truther activists groups and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) website. CAIR is a legally operating 501(c)(3) nonprofit involved in civil rights advocacy and has never been designated as extremist by the US government, despite attempts to do so by GOP lawmakers.

The FV also found a deleted section of the EJN website captured by the Wayback Machine which aggregated links to “organizations that support the BDS movement and label Israel an apartheid state.”

Ewall’s Linkedin page indicates he graduated from the University of the District of Columbia School of Law in 2011, 12 years after he founded the EJN. Some may find Ewall’s resume to be indicative of dedicated focus to a cause. The FV says it is bereft of scholarship and employment qualifications, and that “contractors hired for similar work usually have years of experience with multiple, well-known organizations or academic experience to validate their expertise.” The article also suspects Ewall’s whitepaper may not contain “credible science,” yet makes no attempt to justify this suspicion other than its vague appeal to authority.

UPDATE: 10/26/2025

Mike Ewall submitted the following statement:

The City of Miramar, under Mayor Messam's leadership, has taken a strong and principled stance to oppose plans by Miami-Dade County to build the largest waste burning incinerator in the Americas on their city borders. As part of this effort, the city's law firm hired me to author reports on relevant questions relating to incinerators and landfills, based on my 35-years of experience in the field, including being a national leader in critiquing and opposing waste incineration, as well as sometimes serving as a consultant to some counties in the development of Zero Waste plans.

The most recent report I completed was related to Broward County, as the new Broward County Solid Waste Authority (SWA) is proposing for the county's municipalities to sign up for 40-60 years of committing waste and dollars for a waste system they admit will be more expensive -- a waste system that will do many of the right things to reduce, reuse, recycle and compost materials, but which will also prioritize burning trash and landfilling the toxic ash, instead of doing the cheaper and less polluting option of landfilling the remainder without burning it first. This report is a response to Appendix P of the draft Solid Waste Master Plan, in which the SWA's consultants were asked to evaluate the health impacts of living near trash incinerators.

Currently, the county has one large waste incinerator, the "South Broward" plant, located next to its ash landfill between Davie and Dania Beach about one mile north of the Hard Rock Cafe on 441. It burns up to 2,250 tons of waste per day. It is one of the largest industrial air polluters in Broward County, according to data reported to state and federal environmental agencies.

The "white paper" written for the county made the case that, while studies show that older incinerators show some impacts to public health, "modern" ones do not. The South Broward incinerator is now 34 years old and is likely within its last decade of operation. It is not "modern." However, the report I authored for the City of Miramar documents that the county's consultants misrepresented the science by citing no peer reviewed academic works directly, and choosing 22 sources that all leaned in a pro-incinerator direction. One was directly from authors funded by the incinerator industry. Another cited source was from a waste industry trade association where the consulting company's Vice-President serves as the association's Board President. Other sources were misrepresenting the science. I dug four levels deep in the footnotes in one case to find that the white paper's main claim -- that studies show that "modern" incinerators have no health impacts -- is actually not what half of the cited studies of "modern" incinerators showed. This is all documented in my report, available at www.energyjustice.net/fl/health.pdf. The report also includes seven pages, starting in page four, summarizing studies that have found that communities living around waste incinerators have seen increases in many types of cancers, as well as respiratory illness, cardiovascular diseases, birth defects, urinary diseases, developmental delay, headaches, fatigue, and more.

My academic work speaks for itself and should be evaluated based on its merits, not on character assassination attempts trying to make issues of my views on peace and human rights, which are unrelated to my environmental consulting for the City of Miramar's law firm.

The hit piece by Brendon Leslie was done without bothering to contact me to get facts straight, and contained many errors. It cited an old website I run and claimed it was the Energy Justice Network website (it is not). It claimed that a webpage with links to peace groups and news sources relating to Israel and Palestine was taken down when, in fact, I thought it was still up (a recent website transition into Wordpress caused it to mistakenly redirect to a different page; that is now fixed). The page with links to peace groups and info on 9/11 is one I haven't touched in about 24 years and did just take down, and only because it's so outdated.

The hit piece also stretches reality to claim connections to terrorist groups in two ways. First, it claims that the civil rights organization, Council on American-Islamic Relations (which I had once linked to), is a terrorist group because a far-right congressman has a bill that would designate the group as such -- a bill that has no co-sponsors and is sitting in committee with no action on it. I have no other knowledge of CAIR, but they seem to be about good things like civil rights, free speech, and opposing discrimination. You can visit their website and decide for yourself. The other claim is that a group that used to house my nonprofit once got a $20,000 grant from Grassroots International (GI). That grant was actually not from GI, but from a funder where GI simply served as a financial manager to distribute money to a variety of organizations. I have little knowledge of GI other than just knowing that they work on human rights issues around the world. Their politics are pretty irrelevant to my work, as I have no real or ongoing relationship with them. However, you can look them up and judge for yourself here.

As far as my views go, I was raised by two Jewish parents. An entire branch of my family tree died in the Nazi Holocaust and I'm the product of Jews who escaped antisemitism in the period leading up to it. My Jewish upbringing taught me that this sort of thing must happen "never again" -- and I believe this applies to everyone, not just Jewish people. It is with this understanding that I stand with the majority of public opinion where, just one month ago, over 80% of U.S. residents polled expressed concern about starvation among Palestinians in Gaza and about Israeli military strikes killing Palestinian civilians. There is nothing extreme about not wanting to starve, maim, and murder tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of children, as Israel has been doing to residents in Gaza, not to mention attacks on journalists, medical workers, starving civilians, schools, hospitals, and others in and beyond Gaza and the West Bank. Opposing U.S. taxpayer-funded military support of Israel's genocide in Gaza is mainstream opinion at this point in the U.S., and even more so around the world. An August 2025 poll shows that 60% of U.S. residents disapprove of the U.S. sending military aid to Israel.

As far as 9/11 goes, it is not an extreme view to disbelieve the government's official story. I do not subscribe to the far-out conspiracy theories around the issue, but do not think it's as simple as the official story, either. This is not an extreme view. In fact, many polls of U.S. residents show a large portion of the public does not subscribe to the official story. In one poll of New York City residents in 2004, a whopping 49% believed that individuals within the U.S. government "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act."

While I hope everyone would want to stand up against violence of all sorts, and support peace and human rights for all, the issue that brings me to support South Florida communities is one of environmental justice. Florida is unusual in that it is #1 in waste burning in the nation. The state and certain counties are working to expand a dying incineration industry that most of the country has moved away from. You can find relevant information on my work on this, including all of my reports for the City of Miramar, at this page: http://www.energyjustice.net/fl -- and related information on the topic at http://www.energyjustice.net/incineration and http://www.beyondburning.org (a new site where more Florida-specific information will soon be hosted).

Sincerely,

Mike Ewall, Esq.
Executive Director
Energy Justice Network