Airport Impact Analysis Should Put Magnifying Glass to Montauk, Residents Say

As East Hampton Town wades anew into the task of trying to forecast what impacts reducing the number of aircraft allowed to land at East Hampton Airport might have on other airfields in the region and the communities that surround them, residents of Montauk this week again raised the specter of an “Apocalypse Now” air assault on its small airstrip, potentially unleashing a spiderweb of impacts across the hamlet.

At the first public meeting on the revived proposal to privatize East Hampton Airport and adopt a prior permission required, or PPR, policy that would restrict the quantity, type and timing of flights to and from East Hampton Airport, residents of Montauk said that the proposed analysis the town’s consultants will undertake does not look closely enough at the breadth of Montauk to capture the full extent of the reverberations.

Kelly Bloss, a Montauk resident, told the board that the planned forecasting of potential impacts of car traffic on the hamlet of Montauk needs to cast a far wider net and be stretched over a much longer time frame to accurately capture how traffic could be expected to change because of a still undetermined number of new flights coming to the Montauk Airport.

Rather than just studying the intersections of roads that meet Route 27 west of East Lake Drive, the road leading to Montauk Airport, the study should look at the impacts on all of Westlake Drive, Old Westlake Drive, Industrial Road, Flamingo Avenue, South Edgemere and Second House Road as well, she said.

And the car traffic study needs to be expanded to a 24/7, full-year scope, she added, not just carefully chosen examples of expected “peak” traffic times, as the town’s consultants have proposed.

Bloss surmised that the additional flights to Montauk Airport could snarl traffic in the downtown and substantially change the character of the bustling hamlet. “The proposed action is in direct conflict with the town’s hamlet study — namely the goal of maintaining, improving and revitalizing the downtown’s remarkably charming business district,” she said, “while improving traffic circulation and reducing congestion.”

After conducting a “diversion study” that tried to calculate how excluding some aircraft from East Hampton Airport would change flight patterns around the region, consultants for the town concluded in 2021 that most of the displaced flights would instead head for Francis S. Gabreski Airport in Westhampton, and not Montauk.

Physical limitations would send nearly all of the jet aircraft that might be told they could not use East Hampton to Gabreski Airport in Westhampton, because Montauk Airport’s runways are not long enough for most jets to take off. And many more flights that could technically land in Montauk would likely go elsewhere also for practical reasons, such as Montauk Airport’s geographical remoteness, lack of fueling facilities and airplane services, and limited space for parking aircraft.

The consultants said that in a worst-case scenario of nearly all diverted flights capable of landing in Montauk choosing to do so, traffic at the airport could potentially increase by about a third — but said the actual increase would certainly be far smaller.

But the town did not draw any firm conclusions about how traffic might be affected and what impacts it would have on Montauk as a whole when it introduced plans to privatize the airport last spring and impose new limits on flights. Instead, the town proposed a package of rules and said it would use real-world data, monitoring exactly how aircraft and car traffic patterns changed in Montauk, in Southampton Village and in Westhampton, and tabulating noise, air pollution and traffic congestion statistics. If the results showed significant or unacceptable impacts, the town would then adjust its limits accordingly.

But a state judge blocked the effort, saying that the wait-and-see approach could not be applied, because state law required any policy change with far-reaching potential impacts to be given “a hard look” beforehand.

Late last year, the Town Board reintroduced its proposal — which again calls for overnight curfews, caps on the number of commercial aircraft and helicopters and banned only the largest private jets — and said it would lay out an analysis of the impacts of the changes as best as they could be anticipated.

The town’s consultants on Tuesday presented a timeline that would have the process concluded by the end of 2023, though they acknowledge that the town could only act on its plans and impose the new restrictions “when legally permissible” — a nod to the fact that the judge who blocked their plans last spring had also said that the town’s approach violated federal aviation rules.

The first step in the year-long process is to hear from members of the public and interested groups about what sort of things they think should be analyzed as part of the exhaustive analysis.

Richard Schoen, who is the chairman of the Montauk Fire District and a former chief of the Montauk Fire Department, wondered aloud whether a jump in traffic at the Montauk Airport would necessitate the fire department providing a “crash truck” firetruck like the one stationed at East Hampton Airport. The trucks can cost nearly $1 million and would need a facility at which to store it near the airport.

Erin Sweeney, the executive director of the East Hampton Community Alliance, an East Hampton Airport pilots’ group, asked that the town make note in its analysis of some of the changing realities at the airport — where traffic was wholly scrambled from its historical patterns and where flights were down significantly in 2022 from the year prior.

Tom Bogdan, who has been the drum major of opposition by Montauk residents to the town’s efforts to tamp down traffic at East Hampton Airport, provided the Town Board with one of his typically detailed and flourished pictures of the bustling — sometimes congested — downtown, which is arranged primarily along a section of the same highway that provides access to some of the state’s most popular attractions and parklands.

“Route 27 is a dead-end road, one way in and one way out, and upon entering Montauk it becomes the mile-long Main Street — the economic and social heart of the hamlet,” Bogdan said. “Any analysis of the relationship between the increased commercial air traffic at Montauk Airport and its consequences to the town and citizens of Montauk, must take into account a much deeper understanding of the ground transportation facts.”

The Main Street section of the hamlet’s downtown alone boasts 60 retail business, 18 restaurants, three banks, two churches, has nine crosswalks transversing it and a village green that plays host to a parade of well attended events from farmers markets to concerts.

East Lake Drive is likewise its own ecosystem of businesses, tourist attractions and more than 175 homes that are accessible only from the single two-lane road with no shoulder. Five hotels, five marinas with 365 slips, seven restaurants with 250 seats, two county parks, one with 80 parking slots for towed campers, a town beach, the 350-member Montauk Lake Club and New York State’s largest commercial fish packing house in terms of total tonnage shipped from its docks, all lying between Route 27 and Montauk Airport, Bogdan detailed — the implication seeming to be that any additional vehicle traffic could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

“East Lake Drive is the only access to the Montauk Airport — a 2-mile, two-lane, shoulderless, dead end road,” he said. “One way in, and one way out.”