Court Rebuffs East Hampton Appeal To Lift Court Order Halting Proposed Limits On Airport Activity

A state court has declined to hear an appeal by East Hampton Town to lift a temporary restraining order blocking the town from imposing planned flight restrictions at East Hampton Airport.

The ruling, by a four-judge panel of the State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, was issued on August 25 and flatly denied the town’s request for “leave to appeal” the TRO before a new court. The judges offered no explanation for their decision.

The denial leaves in place the TRO issued on May 16 that blocked the town from imposing a package of new landing rules to limit the number of flights that could be made in a given day by commercial aircraft and by some private helicopters and planes.

Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said that the decision by the appeals court was disappointing and leaves open the possibility that the temporary restraining order would become essentially indefinite.

“The statute says these matters should be adjudicated in a timely manner, but clearly that’s not happening,” Van Scoyoc said, referring to another restraining order issued by the same judge that has been in place for more than 14 months. “I don’t think this one will be years — this issue will get forced through sooner than that, one way or another.”

Before the TRO was issued by State Supreme Court Justice Paul Baisley, the town had been prepared to close down East Hampton Airport at midnight on May 17 and reopen it at 9 a.m. as a legally new, private airport, to be known as East Hampton Town Airport. The move was to be the culmination of 18 months of negotiations with Federal Aviation Administration officials, crafting a path to limiting air traffic at the airport and heading off a town threat to close the facility permanently if noise from aircraft couldn’t be abated.

Under the new private airport, the town had said, it would have the power to impose restrictions on flight traffic that it couldn’t at the previous public airport.

Three groups of plaintiffs — led by airplane hangar owners, pilots, Montauk residents and the charter aircraft company Blade — filed separate lawsuits to stop the town’s plans. A separate lawsuit was field in federal court by an aviation industry group, also seeking a temporary restraining order from the same federal judge who in 2014 had blocked the town from imposing similar flight restrictions at the public airport.

Baisley’s order commanded the town to halt the change in designation at the airport and barred it from imposing the new flight rules.

But the day after the restraining order was put in place, FAA officials informed the town that the technical processes it had already put in motion to effect the switchover from the public airport to the new private airport could not be stopped or reversed. So while the TRO blocked the new flight rules, the airport’s legal identity changed regardless — East Hampton Airport, known to aviators by the call-sign HTO, became East Hampton Town Airport, with the call-sign JPX.

Attorney James Catterson, who represented one of three groups of plaintiffs, asked Baisley to hold the town in contempt of court arguing that the town had deceived the plaintiffs about its intentions and the inevitability of the airport to become a private facility and saying that the town’s process requiring pilots to apply for new flight guidance data violated the order.

Shortly after the TRO was put in place, the Town Board instructed its lawyers to begin working on the legal steps for closing the airport permanently as soon as legally possible, while leaving open the possibility that if they did so they would reopen it when reasonable limits could be placed on flights.

The fight over the airport has already been a costly one.

On Thursday, the Town Board will vote on a resolution to increase the amount it will pay Cooley LLP this year from the original $1.5 million it had allowed in the airport budget to $2.7 million.

All of the town’s legal fees for the airport and the legal battles surrounding it, come from the airport’s dedicated fund, which draws revenues from the leases of commercial industrial lots rimming the airport itself and from landing fees and fuel bills for planes that use the facility.

Opponents of the town’s plans to rein in flight traffic have twice tried to convince courts to bar the town from using airport funds to pay for legal fees — in the hope that the legal battle would be politically untenable if taxpayers were footing the bill.

Van Scoyoc said such selfish strategies by a wealthy few could not be tolerated and defended the expense justified in defending the rights of town residents to stand up for their interests.

“Litigation is expensive, and I am sure the other side would love us to just give up,” he said. “But it’s incumbent upon us to fight for the rights of the citizens of the town.

“If we roll over every time someone with deep pockets doesn’t get their way, where will we be?” he asked. “We didn’t sue anybody — we’re defending lawsuits they are using to try and stop us from standing up for our residents.”

He said the town should be able to regulate the airport as its residents see fit. Van Scoyoc was reelected to a third term as supervisor last fall on a platform that included finding a legal path to limiting aircraft traffic into the airport — and to consider closing it permanently if such a path could not be forged.

“We want reasonable restrictions, that’s all,” he said on Tuesday. “It shouldn’t just be that a few individuals and companies from outside the town get to dictate how we operate. To me, that’s subversion of the democratic process.”

Meanwhile, with Labor Day looming, the supervisor said that aircraft traffic at the airport appears to have been slightly lower this year than in years past, and that changes to flight routes intended to ease the noise impacts on neighborhoods around the airport have shifted where complaints about aircraft noise originate.

More pilots have been using what is known as the “Sierra” route into and out of the airport, following the ocean shoreline while traveling east from the city and then turning inland over Georgica Pond to approach the airport from the south. Earlier this summer, Blade CEO Robert Wiesenthal said that the company had instructed its pilots to use the Sierra route for most flights in an effort to ease noise complaints.

The so-called November route that had been the preferred approach route for helicopters in 2020 and 2021 had spurred a spike in complaints from residents of Noyac and Sag Harbor. It has been much less used this year, the supervisor said.

But complaints from the neighborhoods that had been incensed by one route are simply being replaced by complaints from newly impacted neighborhoods, he said.

“We’re hearing it from places like Amagansett now, for some reason — especially about the jets,” he said. “The number of people who are complaining to us hasn’t changed, I don’t think. It’s just coming from different areas.”