Disruptive Formula One race was forced on Miami Gardens against Black residents’ wishes | Opinion
Alex Piquero and Stephen Olvey’s May 27 op-ed, “These facts about the Formula One race can help ease Miami Gardens residents’ concerns,” exposed the nonsense masquerading as justification for invading our bedroom community in Miami Gardens with the catastrophic effects of Formula 1 racing.
The races at Hard Rock Stadium will create deafening noise and major traffic disruptions, deny residents access to their homes and compromise air quality. After the majority-white community in downtown Miami successfully opposed this assault on their neighborhood in 2018, Miami-Dade County, the Miami Dolphins and F1 are flexing their financial and political muscle to overpower our community — which is over 70 percent Black — despite overwhelming public opposition.
Which proves our point: These races are racist.
Piquero and Olvey ignore the scientific data about the harms the races would inflict on Miami Gardens residents. Their only references to noise are that “F1 cars, which run on turbo-hybrid engines, are among the quietest of all motorsport’s cars,” and “the technology used to engineer F1 cars also is used in commercial refrigerators and the cars and buses in which we ride.”
So what?
The federal civil-rights lawsuit in which I am a plaintiff with 11 other Miami Gardens residents and three homeowners associations, cites the calculations by Leider Acoustics, based on noise projections published by the Dolphins, as well as independently measured noise levels generated by actual Formula One race cars in past years.
According to Leider, the noise levels the Dolphins admit from these “quietest of motorsport’s cars” will subject tens of thousands of Miami Gardens residents, including children and the elderly, to a high risk of permanent hearing damage and other health risks, even with noise barriers. At peak hours of the race, a large number of residents will experience continuous noise exceeding 97 dBA — similar to the sound levels produced by a chainsaw. Hearing damage is likely to occur when someone is exposed to 95 dBA for 50 minutes or 100 dBA for 15 minutes.
Piquero and Olvey also parrot the Dolphins and F1’s overly optimistic projections of economic benefits. Miami Gardens residents and business owners know from bitter experience that whatever hotel, restaurant and other business flows to Miami, Miami Beach and Broward County from stadium events, does not benefit our community.
In October 2019, a unanimous Miami Gardens City Council resolution opposing F1 racing acknowledged that stadium events do not help local business. Yet, in April 2021, the Dolphins’ PR campaign talked newly elected City Council members into rubber-stamping language drafted by the Dolphins.
Most insulting was Piquero and Olvey’s using the name of Black F1 star Lewis Hamilton: “F1, largely at the behest of its most successful and popular driver, Lewis Hamilton, was among the first sports to tackle the issue of racism.” They cite a hashtag campaign “to bring attention to and combat all forms of racism,” having a “moment” before every race to celebrate diversity and inclusion, and “commemorating with shirts and racetrack markings.”
To state the obvious, shirts, racetrack markings and hashtag campaigns are a joke compared to the serious, real-life harms F1 poses to Black Miami Gardens residents.
Make no mistake: This is another chapter in the county’s disgraceful history of discrimination against Black residents in all facets of life — education, housing, policing, voting rights, environmental policies and public contracting. Maybe the professors should read the book, “Black Miami,” by local historian Marvin Dunn to realize the shameful treatment that Blacks have been subjected to in Miami-Dade County — and why we are sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Betty Ferguson is a former Miami-Dade County commissioner representing the city of Miami Gardens. She is the lead named plaintiff in a federal civil-rights lawsuit by several Miami Gardens residents and homeowners’ associations against the county, the Miami Dolphins organization, Formula One and Formula One’s parent company, Liberty Media Corporation.
