East Hampton To Vote On Airport Closure Thursday; 3-Day Hiatus Would Introduce New Rules

The East Hampton Town Board will vote this week on a proposal to officially close East Hampton Airport for three days on February 28 — and then reopen it under a new legal designation that town officials believe will give them the ability to impose new restrictions on flights into the facility.

What those restrictions will entail, exactly, was not part of the sprawling legal pitch for the “unprecedented” temporary closure presented by consultants to the Town Board this Tuesday, January 18, and would likely not go into effect upon the reopening of the airport on March 3. Officials said they expect to have a package of new rules ready for implementation by the start of the summer season in May.

The proposal unveiled on Tuesday, and expected to be adopted on Thursday, calls for the town to immediately begin filing the required paperwork notifying the Federal Aviation Administration and pilots that the airport will cease to operate on February 28, and simultaneously to file for the opening of what would legally be a new airport.

The “new” East Hampton Airport, the town’s aviation attorney, Bill O’Connor, told the Town Board on Tuesday, would be considered a private use airport by the FAA, as opposed to the public airport it is now, which the agency has repeatedly said bars the town from imposing any sort of restrictions on flights.

The town’s plan would be to implement a “prior permission required” system that would require any aircraft to have permission to land at the facility before arriving in its airspace — a restriction not available to public airports.

With such a system, the town would be able to dictate specific guidance on the number of flights that could land at the airport in a day, restrict the types of aircraft or who is operating them, and impose other limitations that could reduce environmental impacts or incentive quieter and cleaner aircraft.

“What we are trying to do is provide you with all of the tools you can reasonably use to address all issues at the airport,” O’Connor, an attorney with the giant California-based international law firm Cooley LLP, told the board and those tuned in for Tuesday’s virtual meeting via Zoom or YouTube. “If you obtain maximum local control, you can address these issues, you can be flexible, and you can adjust certain access restrictions consistent with the community’s evolving needs.”

The attorney said that the prior permission required, or PPR, system would allow the town to most easily impose rules that could range from caps on the number of flights by certain noisy aircraft like helicopters and jets, or on especially noisy models; limits or outright bans on the number of flights flown by commercial operators; and curfews on operation. The system could be tailored to address technological advances or incentivize environmentally sensitive operations, like unleaded fuel and electric aircraft when they become available.

The summer season of 2022 will be a test run for whatever new limits the town imposes, with the effects tracked across the region and compiled for the town to review at the end of the year. Most closely watched, town officials have said, will be the impacts of any changes on Montauk Airport and other places where flights that were barred from East Hampton might shift.

The proposal, details of which swept through the airport-interested community within minutes of the consultant’s presentation being posted on the town website ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, was met with a new deluge of opinions from residents and aviation industry advocates. For more than two hours at the start of Tuesday’s virtual board meeting, lawmakers fielded dozens of call-in statements from a familiar collection of interested parties, offering a familiar selection of takes on the matter.

Also consistent from recent discussions was the dissatisfaction with the temporary closure and subsequent flight restrictions approach the town has embraced among those who are the most dug in on either side of the issue.

Critics of the airport — primarily residents of neighborhoods beneath flight paths — decried the continued operation of the airport in any form as the self-interest of the “1 percent” being put above the quality of life and health of the broader community.

Aviators, on the other hand, fanned fears that legal challenges would make the temporary closure permanent, that restrictions on flights would affect local small plane owners, and that any other changes would cause new impacts in communities untouched by airplane noise.

“I think that full closure of the airport is about the only solution that will satisfy the noise and environmental concerns of the community,” said Vincent Coviello, a Wainscott resident. “Granting permission to any aircraft will result in the harm of the many to the benefit of the few.”

Aviation advocates asserted their frequent claims that any limitation on flights at the East Hampton Airport would shift a thundering new fleet of aircraft to Montauk, Southampton Village, Westhampton — and even, possibly, helicopters and seaplanes in Sag Harbor.

“Closure of the airport is not the answer to address these noise concerns,” said Melissa Tomkeil, president of the app-based flight booking company Fly Blade, which built its business largely on flights between Manhattan and East Hampton. “Any closure will have drastic consequences for residents of Southampton, Westhampton, Montauk, Sag Harbor and other parts of East Hampton due to the diversion of aircraft traffic. Please understand that people are not going to stop flying if you close the airport.”

At the extremes of both positions were forecasts of environmental Armageddon if airplanes are allowed to continue flying and claims that cancer patients would certainly die if they are not — along with numerous comments based on wildly inaccurate assumptions and claims that have increasingly swirled around the issue. The misinformation, which seems to have especially taken hold among Montauk residents, was decried by town officials as unproductive, save for stirring up emotions of the ill-informed.

“It seems like there’s still a whole lot of misinformation and almost conspiracy theory-like comments that were made,” Councilwoman Sylvia Overby said. “You need to get your facts straight and you need to quit scaring people. Fear mongering doesn’t play well.”

“I know this is an extremely emotional topic for many people on all sides of the argument, but we’re going to do this in a very rational and methodical way,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said. “Take a look at what the greatest impacts are, and try to reduce those or eliminate them.”

The town’s announcement plants a new milestone in the now eight-year struggle by the Town Board to secure local control of the airport’s aircraft traffic.

In 2015, the new Democratic board majority adopted curfews and a law limiting aircraft traffic at the facility — especially by helicopters, whose pulsing blades are the focus of most noise complaints and whose numbers have climbed steadily with the growing popularity of $800-per-seat commuter flights.

A court battle ensued, during which a judge allowed the curfews to go into effect but not the limits on the number of flights. After two years of curfews and court wrangling, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the town’s arguments and ultimately the curfews and flight restrictions were found to be illegal under the FAA’s sole authority to regulate air traffic at public airports.

Soon afterward, the Town Board seized on the September 2021 expiration of the grant assurances as the moment when it would earn the power to take the one step it could without FAA approval: closing the airport.

The town tried to leverage that threat to push pilots and aviation groups — especially those behind commuter helicopter companies — to change their habits and adopt policies that would ease the impacts on residents under their flight paths. The pleadings and threats seemed largely to fall on deaf ears.

Through years of legal wrangling, the FAA had been the town’s frequent foil, refusing to allow the town to impose limitations other than through a years-long, costly and likely feebly effective legal process. But the agency and the town’s representatives have had a decidedly different relationship in the months leading up to the expiration of operational assurances tied to federal grants this past September and since. Bill O’Connor characterized the guidance and assistance that he and the town have had with the FAA over the last year as “very productive, very cooperative, very solution-oriented” in seeking a way for the town to tamp down noise impacts without a permanent closure of the airport — resulting directly in the approach the town is now adopting.

Stretching across a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in March, the closure would cover what would historically be a time frame that would see some of the lowest number of operations at the airport. It will come, however, just shy of two years after the local start the COVID-19 pandemic and the drastic changes it brought to aircraft travel to the South Fork, especially on weekdays in the traditional offseason months. Lisa Liquori, one of the town’s consultants, said that the short duration of the closure is not out of step with the interruptions that maintenance work at any airport may require.

The board is expected to vote on the proposal on Thursday — presumably after another lively round of input from residents.

The supervisor on Tuesday cast the approach the town is embarking on as simply turning back the clock on the airport, in hopes that a balance can be found between easing the pains of those who want the nuisance extinguished completely and the broader community’s sympathy for their plight but general hesitancy to do away with the facility entirely.

“In this last election cycle, we were barraged by questions about the airport … and the take away was, for me, that the airport remains something that people would like to retain,” Van Scoyoc, who had championed the temporary closure approach during the campaign and easily won reelection to a third term in the town’s top post, said on Tuesday. “The problem is that it’s grown so much beyond what the acceptable footprint is that it’s raised a lot of voices who simply say let’s just close the airport.

“Part of that is the belief that we can’t put that airport back into a footprint that people will accept,” he added. “That’s the path we’re taking. We’re trying to get the airport back to a level that the community accepts.”