Montauk Airport Sold Amid Fears For East Hampton Future

East Hampton Town officials said that they had negotiated for more than two years with the owners of Montauk Airport toward a potential town purchase of the property — possibly for as much as $14 million — but lost out last week to a deal with a private buyer that saved the former owner millions in taxes.

“We were competitive,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said this week as the town sought to deflect criticism that it had not tried to purchase the airport to head off a possible major expansion of flight traffic there in the future.

The airport is said to have sold for $14 million earlier this month to an as yet unnamed buyer.

“We were in that ballpark, but the way they wanted to do it changed the math for us,” Van Soyoc said of the sale negotiations. “The problem wasn’t really the price, it was just the structure of the sale, and we couldn’t overcome that.”

Until June 14, the airport had been owned as a C corporation, with five shareholders — the majority owner being Gregory Holcombe — and Van Scoyoc said that the group wanted to effect a stock sale for the property, which would save the sellers some capital gains taxes.

“That group has owned that airport for a really long time, so it was probably millions of dollars’ difference for them,” Van Scoyoc surmised. “But under New York State law, a municipality cannot take stock. We went round and round with different ways of structuring it, even with bringing in an intermediary.”

A press release by the town on Tuesday said that it had tried to effect the purchase through “a well-intentioned private intermediary to acquire the airport assets through the sellers’ preferred deal structure, followed by a concurrent sale of the airport land to the town.”

“The town looks forward to working with the new ownership of the Montauk Airport to ensure that the community’s concerns regarding noise and environmental impacts are addressed to the fullest extent possible,” the statement from Van Scoyoc’s office said.

Perry “Chip” Duryea, who was the managing partner of the airport business since 2004, would not confirm the sale price. But he confirmed that Van Scoyoc’s explanation of the hurdles to a town purchase of the property was generally accurate.

The new owners have appointed Neil Blainey as the manager of the airport. Blainey said on Monday that the ownership will not be making any significant changes to the facility in the near future, but is making moves to try and tamp down late-night flights and make the airport more “friendly.”

The airport manager, at the new ownership’s instruction, has told all operators that they do not want flights using the facility between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. While they cannot impose an actual curfew, he said, the airport now charges a $500 late operations fee on any commercial flight that lands or takes off late at night or very early in the morning.

“It’s working already,” Blainey said in a message on Tuesday. “The companies are telling their passengers about the late fee, and people are leaving earlier.”

In a statement earlier this week, Blainey had said that the new owners are eager to build “on the long history of Montauk Airport, as we remain committed to servicing the needs of the community and region.”

Blainey worked for Long Island Airlines, the small charter aircraft company owned by the late Ben and Bonnie Krupinski, for 14 years and said he is intimately familiar with Montauk Airport’s operations in the recent past.

​Montauk Airport had been for sale for several years, with public asking prices as high as $18 million, but both Duryea and Van Scoyoc acknowledged that it was the town’s efforts to rein in air traffic at East Hampton Airport that finally spurred the flurry of interest that led to its purchase.

Van Scoyoc said that he’s been told that in recent months there had been as many as five interested parties making bids to purchase the 4-acre airport and its 3,500-foot runway.

The Montauk Airport has been in the spotlight over the last two years as East Hampton Town Board members worked on crafting a strategy to limit flight traffic to the municipally owned airport. A plan to impose new restrictions that would have limited commercial and larger aircraft to a single trip per day was blocked by a judge last month. In the wake of the court order, the Town Board asked attorneys to begin plotting a course to close what is now officially known as East Hampton Town Airport completely — while acknowledging that it could be reopened at some point in the future when and if “reasonable” restrictions can be imposed.

But the threat of restrictions seemed to be the driving force behind the new buyer’s interest, Duryea said.

He noted that Montauk Airport — which was built in 1957 by his father, Perry Duryea Jr., a former U.S. Navy pilot and state assemblyman who often flew his own plane from Montauk to Albany for Assembly sessions, and others seeking to improve access to the hamlet — is much more constrained than East Hampton Airport in the types of aircraft it can accommodate. Its single airstrip is just 3,500 feet long, too short to accommodate jets, and the airport does not have fueling facilities.

The largest aircraft that can use the facility is a single-engine turboprop capable of carrying about eight people, he said.

“Anything larger than that, like corporate jets, would have to go to Westhampton,” he said, in the event that East Hampton Airport were to close.

“I don’t think they had had any offers recently,” Van Scoyoc said of the sale. “So we probably helped them out.”