Ferry Hearing Postponed; Seaplanes An Emerging Issue In Sag Harbor

Two subjects that have been in the Sag Harbor news of late, seaplanes and passenger ferries, were conspicuous by their absence from the Sag Harbor Village Board agenda on Tuesday evening, June 14 — but that doesn’t mean they were not discussed.

The board was expected to hold a hearing on the Peconic Jitney’s proposed ferry service linking the village and Greenport, but it was postponed until July at the request of the Jitney, which, Mayor Jim Larocca said, was not ready to present its case.

The company, a spin-off of the Hampton Jitney, has been seeking to relaunch a service that was run as a successful pilot program in 2012. The Suffolk County Legislature has given the company a five-year license to operate the ferry, but neither Sag Harbor nor Greenport have signed contracts with the operation yet.

The proposed ferry has met opposition from some, who question whether it will bring more traffic and exacerbate a parking shortage in a village that has only grown more hectic in the summertime during the past decade.

The arrival this year of regularly schedule seaplane service through the Blade app has also raised eyebrows, with some fearing that Sag Harbor Bay will be inundated with flights as an alternative to East Hampton Airport should East Hampton Town officials make good on plans to restrict flights to and from the facility.

Tuesday night, Ken Deeg, who has a contract with the village to run a launch service in the harbor, appeared before the board to urge it to not adopt any laws that would further restrict the use of village waterways by seaplanes.

Deeg said that seaplanes, usually charters or private flights, have been landing in the bay ever since he began to operate the launch service about 15 years ago, and that they only started to become a nuisance about five or six years ago as their numbers increased, and pilots began to fly too low or close to shore and even landed in the boating channel.

Deeg said he had made a personal effort to communicate with pilots and try “to get everyone on the same page,” adding, “The biggest problem was the pilots did not know where to land.”

He said he had placed a new, larger floating dock on a mooring about 600 feet from the village’s 4,000-foot jurisdiction to help give pilots a visual aid for where to land, so they would be able to stay farther away from shore. Deeg added that pilots have agreed to fly over the water from New York City and approach Sag Harbor from over Orient Point to minimize disturbances. “I thought this was a massive win for everyone,” he said.

He added that many planes land in Sag Harbor Bay when they are fogged out from East Hampton Airport and suggested that some land there because they do not have enough fuel to fly to Francis S. Gabreski Airport in Westhampton.

But Trustee Aidan Corish, who is also a pilot, took issue with some of Deeg’s claims, saying pilots would never fly anywhere without sufficient fuel to reach an alternative airport. The problem with seaplanes, he said, is they have to both land and take off into the wind and require a significant distance, about 3,000 feet, to be able to safely avoid a 50-foot-tall obstruction.

“I have a lot of issues with this, which we will, no doubt, discuss going forward,” Corish said. The bigger issue, he added, is that planes are now being sent to Sag Harbor on regularly scheduled flights, not just occasional charters. Corish has suggested the village may want to ban seaplanes from taxiing in village waters, which East Hampton did last year.

Larocca said he wanted to be careful to not disrupt an arrangement that had developed “organically” and had not caused problems in the past, but Corish argued that the village needs to be vigilant and get sound advice. “My concern is not so much with the past, even not so much with now,” he said. “It’s what we’re looking at into the future, and we should take control of this.”

If East Hampton restricts helicopter flights, that will simply lead to more seaplane flights to Sag Harbor, he said.

“I can guarantee you it will be a lot easier to keep this from happening than to stop it once it becomes a normal, routine and daily operation,” he said.