Federal Lawsuit Over East Hampton Airport Withdrawn, Though Town Sees a Possible Motive

A national aviation organization has withdrawn the lawsuit it filed last spring against East Hampton Town in federal court challenging the town’s authority to impose flight restrictions at East Hampton Airport.

A spokesman for the National Business Aviation Association said the suit was withdrawn because an October ruling by a Suffolk County judge has already blocked the town from limiting flight traffic, and it specifically cited the federal law that the NBAA’s lawsuit had focused on.

State Supreme Court Justice Paul Baisley ruled on October 20 that the town’s plans to temporarily close East Hampton Airport and reopen it as a private airport, with new rules limiting air traffic, had not been crafted in accordance with state law. The proposal failed to thoroughly lay out what the impacts of the new airport on other communities would be — which the town had said it planned to study during the first months of the new rules, with plans to then use those findings to fine-tune its restrictions.

Baisley also said that regardless of the process of crafting the limits, the town could not impose restrictions on air traffic because the federal Airport Noise and Capacity Act, or ANCA, left that authority solely with the Federal Aviation Administration.

“From that moment on, our effort became duplicative,” Alex Gertsen, the NBAA’s director of airports, said on Monday of the group’s reasoning for withdrawing its lawsuit. “Our position was that the town was not able to [impose restrictions] because it would violate ANCA. And since the state court issue was about [the New York State Environmental Quality Review Act] as well as ANCA, we felt that we don’t need to continue the application at the federal level.”

The federal suit was part of what an attorney for the town last week called a “constellation” of legal attacks on the town by aviation interests over the proposal to impose limits on flight traffic.

Three lawsuits by separate groups of aviation-related plaintiffs were brought in Suffolk County court — the cases that ultimately landed with Baisley — plus a fourth in Nassau County court and the NBAA case in federal court. There is also an administrative appeal to the FAA by two local charter pilots, which also focuses on the town’s authority under ANCA.

Gertsen said that the NBAA had filed its suit in May only because the challenges in the state courts, which had been filed in February, had been repeatedly delayed as three judges recused themselves from the cases and the May 17 deadline for the town’s planned closure of the airport approached.

Ultimately, the arguments over a temporary restraining order in the Suffolk County case was heard by Baisley on the same day that the NBAA took its request to halt the town’s plans to U.S. District Court Judge Joanna Seybert.

As the attorneys for the NBAA and town were just beginning to make their arguments to Seybert, word came down that Baisley had issued a temporary restraining order on the town’s privatization plans. Seybert immediately agreed to put further movement of the federal case on the shelf.

But the town had hoped that Seybert and the federal court case would actually give them a window to dispense with the ANCA issue once and for all.

When the town tried to impose very similar restrictions on flights at the airport in 2015, it was Seybert who ruled that the ANCA precluded the town taking such steps without going though a years-long FAA application process.

That was before federal grant assurances expired in 2021, though, and the town and its attorneys have said that development gives the town the power to close the public airport if it sees fit and reopen it as a technically new and private facility.

Private airports typically are able to set their own parameters for flights to and from their runways through “prior permission required,” or PPR, rules.

The town has said it worked closely with FAA officials on its plans to transition East Hampton Airport to a private facility and adopt a PPR that would impose curfews and limit flights by commercial aircraft and most helicopters to just one per day per aircraft — and expects that the FAA would stand by the position that the town was acting within its rights.

One of the town’s attorneys, Bill O’Connor, told the Town Board last week that his team planned to ask Seybert to invite the FAA to make its position on the town’s PPR proposal known — a potential watershed moment on the ANCA matter. “I do expect to see some decisions out of that court soon,” he said at the time.

The town has appealed the Baisley ruling, but O’Connor said it may well be two years before the state appeals court could be expected to offer a decision on the matter.

Attorneys told the Town Board last week that they are already working on recrafting the privatization proposal to address the failures under state law in Baisley’s decision in hopes of reintroducing the matter.

Town officials said that the NBAA withdrawing the federal suit could be a calculated maneuver to stop the higher federal court from determining that the ANCA issue is moot.

“I think it could be interpreted as a strategic move to head off the federal court from addressing the ANCA issues under significantly changed circumstances from the last time they looked at this,” East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said. “We remain confident that our defense of the NBAA legal claims is strong, and that this lawsuit never should have been brought in the first place.”

Regardless, Gertsen said that the NBAA has taken the opportunity of the lawsuit’s withdrawal to appeal to town officials to work with aviators to craft new voluntary limitations on flights in the hope that the sort of reductions in aircraft noise the town has said it is seeking can be achieved outside of the courts and without the town needing to jump through legal hoops to force through new rules.

“We feel the best path to preserving the long-term future of the airport is to come to the table with the town,” Gertsen said. “Voluntary procedures have been working. We’re not disagreeing that more can be done and the solutions can be enhanced. We’re doing a lot already and … we see a path forward within the legal framework to work out a solution.”