East Hampton Will Not Seek To Close Airport Permanently After Court Ruling

Attorneys for East Hampton Town advised the Town Board on Tuesday, November 15, that officials should not consider pursuing an indefinite closure of East Hampton Airport in the wake of a judge’s ruling that plans for a temporary closure and imposition of flight restrictions last spring did not comply with state or federal law.

While attorney Bill O’Connor said that there may be legal interpretations that would say the ruling last month applied only to the town’s temporary closure plans and does not, in fact, preclude it from pursuing a complete closure of the airport, he said he would advise against doing so.

“There are a lot of pieces of the puzzle. Some might say no, based on the recent order; some might say yes,” O’Connor said in response to a question from resident Cheryl Gold, who asked whether the airport could just be closed for good. “We have to take a more wait-and-see approach on that question. It’s something we’ve all talked about, but I wouldn’t recommend the town stake out a legal position on that at this point.”

Instead, the town will appeal the October ruling, but also reboot the approach to imposing restrictions to address the procedural shortcomings that the judge, State Supreme Court Justice Paul J. Baisley Jr., said the initial effort lacked.

In doing so, another of the town’s attorneys, Dan Ruzow, told the board, the town could expect to have the process completed well before a state appellate court would be expected to issue a decision on the appeal.

Baisley’s ruling said that the town’s approach to imposing the restrictions failed to meet state requirements that the potential impacts of any action be examined beforehand.

The town had proposed implementing new limitations on flights on a test-run basis for the summer 2022 season and studying the impacts — primarily, how flight patterns changed at the other airfields in the region, especially Montauk — in real time. Having “real world” data about how restricting flights to East Hampton might shift flight patterns elsewhere was preferable to hypothetical forecasts by statisticians and analysts, the town had said.

But three groups of plaintiffs, led by the charter flight booking company Blade and two groups of East Hampton Airport plane owners, sued to stop the new rules from being test run. Baisley issued a temporary restraining order in May, just 24 hours before the town had been set to implement its plan, and in mid-October he said the process could not go forward as proposed.

O’Connor on Tuesday said the judge’s reasoning had been flawed and that, in fact, state statute does allow for data on impacts to be gathered after the fact when appropriate.

But because of the long time frames for appeals in the overloaded New York court system, the town will forge ahead with the hypothetical analysis and a second bite at the flight-restrictions apple.

“My impression of the sentiment from the Town Board is that you all are more resolved than ever to address these difficult issues at the airport,” O’Connor said. “The question is, what’s next?”

Ruzow said the new effort to introduce flight limitations will kick off by the end of the year, but that it will take “many months” to restart the analysis process and delve into forecasting how flight patterns might change when flights to East Hampton are limited — leaving in doubt whether the town’s plans will be rebooted by summer 2023, even if the new effort is not met with another round of legal challenges.

A federal court case is also still pending, brought by the National Business Aviation Association, that claims the town does not have power under federal law to impose restrictions on flights. Baisely had affirmed that claim in his ruling also, but O’Connor told the town that the federal court is where the matter should be settled — with the input of the Federal Aviation Administration.

The judge hearing the federal case, Joanna Seybert, also presided over the lawsuits brought against the town the last time it tried to impose similar flight limits, in 2015. In that case, Seybert ruled that the federal Airport Noise Capacity Act precluded the town from imposing restrictions without FAA approval. But since that time, federal grant assurances at the airport have expired, and in 2021 and early 2022 the FAA worked with the town’s attorneys to craft the strategy it proposed last summer. O’Connor said he expects the ANCA issue to be settled in the federal court case.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the state cases this week filed a motion asking Baisley to order the town’s attorneys to return any money they have been paid by the town since May, arguing that the judge had said airport funds, which the town has used to pay its legal bills, could not be used for anything other than physical operations of the airport. The town has authorized up to $2.7 million to be spent from the airport’s revenues, which come from landing fees and fuel sales, on legal expenses this year.

The news that the town could not, or would not, consider a permanent closure of the airport came as a shock to those who have lobbied for the airport’s permanent closure.

“To state that a town has no control over its own property, simply because it has previously been used as an airport, cannot possibly be valid,” said Barry Raebeck, who lives near the airport and has lobbied that it should be closed permanently.

Aviators pleaded with the town to use the forced halt in its charge to rein in air traffic to work with pilots and their representatives to craft limitations that pilots could follow voluntarily and achieve at least some of the noise reductions.

“We want to find a solution, we want a compromise. We are okay with restrictions,” said Kathryn Slye, vice president of the East Hampton Aviation Association, a pilot advocacy group. “We are fine with restrictions on this airport. Everyone in the aviation community is okay with restrictions. … It’s just a question of how those restrictions look and whether they work or not.”

Slye said that the local pilots have proposed a package of restrictions on flights at the airport that are very similar to what the town had proposed, albeit eliminating some of the changes that had been seen as unnecessarily onerous to the owners of small planes based at the East Hampton Airport — including increased fees.

“Work with the aviation community,” she said. “Sit down with us. We want to talk.”

Tom Bogdan, a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits that derailed the town’s plans, also implored the Town Board to address directly the issues that had led to the opposition that rose in Montauk. Bodgan is the founder of a group called Montauk United, under whose banner he mounted a campaign against the town’s plans last year, focusing on worst-case-scenario statistics of how flights could be redirected to Montauk’s tiny airport should East Hampton close or substantially limit flights.

“Montauk is not the enemy here,” he said to the Town Board during Tuesday’s meeting. “We want to work with you — but at the same time, we’re frightened by you. You have not said one word about what you will do if Montauk is disastrously affected by the arrival of new planes. You’ve lied to us once … in promising Montauk will never be affected by flights. We don’t trust you.”

Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc rebuked Bogdan, saying that he has used his platform as Montauk United to spread false information about the town’s proposal and what the impacts of it might be in Montauk.

“I don’t appreciate your comments that we are liars,” Van Scoyoc said. “I don’t think you are helping spread true information amongst your group at all. Fear-mongering is not the way to solve problems.”

O’Connor also hit back at Bogdan’s claims, saying that the town had made it abundantly clear in every discussion of its plans from early in the process that one of the main reasons the town had proposed to implement the new flight restrictions on a trial basis and do an in-depth study of the effects was to insure that the problem of aircraft noise was not simply shifted to Montauk.

“The whole trial period for the [restrictions] was to address the concerns in Montauk,” the attorney said. “It was something we talked about all the time.”