East Hampton Officials Take Off With New Effort To Limit Airport Flights, Smirk at 'Desperate' Smear Campaign by Aviators in Print Ads

It’s back to square one this week for the effort to privatize East Hampton Airport and limit flight traffic to the facility.

The Town Board on Thursday, December 15, will reintroduce a proposal to temporarily close East Hampton Airport, reopen it as a private airport, and adopt a prior permission required system that will impose curfews on all flights and limit the number of trips per day by commercial charter aircraft or helicopters, among other new rules.

The move comes just two months after a judge said that the town’s approach earlier this year violated state review requirements.

“This is a restart of the town’s efforts to take control over the airport operations,” attorney Dan Ruzow said at the start of a presentation on the renewed initiative.

The first step of the new approach will be the introduction of the draft scoping document — the laundry list of potential impacts that limiting flights at the airport may or may not have on a wide variety of conditions around the region, from automobile traffic to noise pollution to air pollution to the local economy.

The Town Board will schedule a public meeting for mid-January, at which residents and interest groups will be invited to make their own suggestions of impacts that should be studied as part of the exhaustive analysis of the impacts of the proposed changes at the airport that is required by the State Environmental Quality Review Act, or SEQRA.

On October 20, State Supreme Court Justice Paul Baisley ruled that the town’s initial approach to this analysis — which was to impose the restrictions on a pilot basis and then monitor and record the impacts in real time before adopting a permanent flight policy — did not meet the SEQRA mandates. He blocked the town from taking the approach, as he had done on a temporary basis back in May, just hours before the brief closure and privatization was to take place.

The town is appealing that ruling, which also said the town was violating federal aviation guidelines in trying to impose its own rules. But attorneys have told the Town Board that appeal could take as long as two years before a higher state court might overturn Baisley’s determination.

In the meantime, the town hopes to dispense with SEQRA issues that were the basis of Baisley blocking the move.

The town’s proposal will once again be to close the East Hampton Airport for a brief period — last spring the proposal was for a 33-hour closure — after which the airport would be reopened as a private facility that would be accessible only to aircraft that conformed to the adopted limitations on flights and other operational guidelines.

Ruzow said that the analysis of the potential impacts of the new rules at the airport would look at how the restrictions might be expected to affect flight patterns at East Hampton Airport, as well as at other airfields in the region — namely Montauk Airport, Francis S. Gabreski Airport in Westhampton and the Southampton Village helipad. The analysis will also explore other secondary ripple-effect impacts, like changes in auto traffic patterns that might occur from people choosing other modes of transportation or flying to different airfields and how more or less aircraft or auto traffic might affect air and noise pollution.

The state-mandated analysis requires exploring alternatives to the proposed steps as well, and Ruzow said the impact statement will look at how the same factors might be expected to change should the town choose to adopt somewhat less restrictive new rules or, conversely, to permanently close the airport and repurpose the land.

While the professional consultants will have come up with the bulk of the factors to be considered, Ruzow said that public input on the scope of such studies is always a key component. “We will ask the members of the public to take the [analysis] seriously and provide us with their thoughts,” Ruzow said. “It’s all important for the board to hear from [the public].”

The Town Board has been trying to impose restrictions on flights at the airport since 2015, spurred by decades of complaints about aircraft noise over residential neighborhoods under flight paths. The cries — and official complaints registered online by the tens of thousands — have reached a crescendo since the waning of the Great Recession and the rise of internet-based booking of commuter flights between New York City and East Hampton, which have driven the price per seat of an express route over traffic-clogged roads to an “affordable” $800 or less each way.

The town’s efforts have been battled at every step by deep-pocketed aviation groups — from wealthy individuals who fear being blocked from coming and going through the airport as they wish, to corporate interests protecting profit streams.

They have mounted successful legal challenges both times the town has tried to impose flight restrictions — this year through a total of five lawsuits and an administrative appeal to the FAA, which was withdrawn this past week.

In 2015, helicopter owners sunk more than $500,000 into an unsuccessful attempt to dethrone the Democrats who have led the flight restrictions charge at the polls.

And, most recently, an anonymous group poured money into an aggressive advertising campaign that has disparaged members of the Town Board and tried to seed a narrative that the airport control effort is costing taxpayers dearly and deeply dividing the town.

On Tuesday, Town Board members jabbed at the campaign — which the ads, running almost weekly in The East Hampton Star, say are paid for by “Political Transparency INC.” — as low-class desperation, driven by profit-minded out-of-towners seeking to bully the town government into giving up the fight.

A full-page ad in last week’s edition of The East Hampton Star featured a photo of Councilman David Lys, with an arrow pointing at his face, and called the Town Board “bullies.”

Lys himself responded to the ad on Tuesday with a remembrance of all the previous times his face had been in The Star, from the first time — as a child, in 1982, on Santa’s lap — to his athletic days at “Bonac Tech,” to stories about his teenage fight with cancer, to his going on six years on the Town Board. He wondered if those who paid for the ad thought it was possible that anybody in the town didn’t already well know who he is.

“To learn who I am, just call David Lys,” he said. “Or look at me. Come to my office. You can see me in 3D.”

Van Scoyoc was less restrained in attacking the clear attempt at intimidation, taunting those behind the ads, saying the doltish approach exposes them as desperate and soulless.

“These ads … are funded by aviation interests who are suing us in court and would like us to stop defending those suits,” Van Scoyoc said. “They’re perpetrating a lie that we’re using taxpayer funds to defend this litigation. But the fact of the matter is that we’re using the airport fund, which is solely based on revenue from the very people who are suing us. So they are paying for both sides of this. And I think they would like us to roll over. We’re not going to roll over.”

The town will spend more than $3 million in airport revenues, primarily from landing fees and fuel sales, to fund its fight to reduce air traffic in 2022 alone.

“The more they come at us with ads and say terrible things about us, people who have spent decades as a part of the fabric of this community, the more they’ve shown they’ve lost this argument,” he added. “This is all they have left. All they have on their side is money. They have no souls, if they’re going after a father of four beautiful girls like this.”

Councilwoman Cate Rogers said that the ads are most offensive to the very residents they would seem to be appealing to.

“They have the audacity to think the people who live in East Hampton have no idea who they are electing, have no idea of the jobs that they do and are so … uninformed and, quite frankly, stupid as to believe that any of this nonsense could possibly be true and to be swayed by it,” she said. “I’m more angry about what they are saying about our community as a whole than what they could possibly say about any of us.”