Proposed Calverton Air Cargo Facility May Impact South Fork

Jet planes carrying cargo for delivery across the Long Island region may be landing on the East End for the first time, if an application now pending in Riverhead Town gains approval.

A development plan being advanced by Triple Five, a Canada-based international conglomerate best known for developing the largest shopping malls in North America, calls for the construction of 9.2 million square feet of logistics and distribution buildings along the runways at the Calverton Enterprise Park.

In addition to the logistics buildings, the company plans to build a 400,000-square-foot rail distribution building at a Long Island Rail Road siding at the site. The rail spur was refurbished by the town about a decade ago. The developer is also proposing to build two 100,000-square-foot office buildings.

The new facilities, together with improvements to the site’s two runways — one 10,000 feet long, the other 7,000 feet long — will allow Calverton to fill a need for cargo handling in the downstate region, the developer’s representatives said during the first public presentation of its plans in September. Packages bound for logistics and distribution centers on Long Island — like the Amazon last-mile facility in Westhampton — are either flown to JFK or Newark and transported from there by tractor-trailers, or trucked into the region from more distant cargo hubs.

“Currently, that end of the logistics business is not handled on Long Island,” Chris Robinson, an engineer and principal in R&M Engineering in Huntington, the applicant’s engineering consultants, told the Riverhead Industrial Development Agency at its September meeting.

“This would be an incredible opportunity to bring that here … to provide that on Long Island and help feed Long Island from that end of it, versus all of the trucking that currently comes … from points west,” Robinson said.

Triple Five, through an affiliate, is in contract with the Town of Riverhead to purchase more than 1,600 acres of industrially zoned land, including the two runways, at the Calverton Enterprise Park, where Northrop Grumman once built and tested fighter jets for the U.S. Navy. The land being sold is currently vacant but for two runways and the rail spur off the LIRR Greenport branch.

The buyer has been in contract with Riverhead Town since November 2018, but the town has been unable to complete the land subdivision needed to transfer the property due to regulatory issues with the State Department of Environmental Conservation. The outstanding issues include a dispute over whether the town water district or the Suffolk County Water Authority has the right to supply water to the new development and the failure of Riverhead Town to complete a habitat protection plan satisfactory to the DEC.

The town is now planning to transfer all of its property at the enterprise park to the Riverhead Industrial Development Agency, which will lease to the Triple Five affiliate the 1,644 acres of land subject to the sale.

The September meeting of the Riverhead IDA was the first time the current development plans were publicly aired. The developer is seeking financial assistance from the IDA in the form of exemptions from state and county sales taxes, mortgage recording taxes and real property taxes.

The Triple Five affiliate, Calverton Aviation & Technology, had its application accepted by the Riverhead IDA for review at the agency’s September 21 meeting, after the company’s attorneys, engineers and architects presented the plans.

The plans made public at that meeting surprised and alarmed area residents. Use of the site as a cargo logistics hub had not previously been publicly discussed by the applicant or town officials.

“This isn’t to serve our needs — it’s designed to relieve JFK and Newark of cargo air traffic,” said Kathy McGraw, a member of EPCAL Watch, a coalition formed six years ago to monitor proposals for use of the site, which McGraw called “a moving target” from the start.

“What will we get out of it? Planes overhead day and night, and our already-jammed roads will be further clogged with nonstop tractor-trailer trucks,” McGraw said. “This is nothing but bad news for the entire East End of Long Island.”

Bob DeLuca, president of Group for the East End, agrees. “I think the region has to get its arms around this property, because the consequences, which are not all that clear, don’t look that good,” he said on Monday. “Understanding the potential consequences of this property building out with a much larger aviation footprint than anybody ever envisioned is consequential for the region.”

The impacts of more air traffic and changed air traffic patterns would need to be throughly studied, DeLuca said.

A 10-mile radius from the runways — within which planes landing in Calverton would fly at an altitude of under 2,000 feet — takes in a large area, including portions of western Southampton Town and eastern Brookhaven.

Riverhead Town should require the developer to prepare a supplemental environmental impact statement for the plan, DeLuca said, because the existing GEIS did not analyze impacts of cargo planes using the runways and analyzed data, such as traffic counts, that are now too old to be relevant.

“You can do a supplemental if there’s new information, if there’s changing circumstances, as there are in Calverton,” DeLuca said.

The applicant’s attorney maintains that all of the analysis required by the State Environmental Quality Review Act is already completed.

Christopher Kent, a partner in the Farrell Fritz law firm, which represents Triple Five, argues that the company is not proposing a cargo airport at the site, which he says will be developed in compliance with all zoning regulations currently in effect. The zoning prohibits scheduled passenger flights and limits runway use to tenants and owners inside the enterprise park.

According to CAT’s application to the Riverhead IDA, the first million square feet of development, phase 1A, will cost an estimated $245 million, including acquisition and soft costs. The applicant says it does not yet have any tenants for the site.

Robinson, Triple Five’s engineer, told the Riverhead IDA board in September that Amazon is an example of the kind of tenant the warehouses along the runway would serve. Amazon is building or leasing “last-mile” distribution centers throughout Long Island to get online purchases to consumers, Robinson said. Right now, goods are delivered to the last-mile centers by tractor-trailers hauling cargo from larger warehouses or airports like JFK and Newark. They are the only two airports in the New York region that currently handle cargo.

“Metropolitan New York has been a struggle for Amazon,” said transportation and urban planning expert Joseph Schwieterman, director of the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at Depaul University in Chicago.

The institute studies, among other things, air travel, and has been studying the growth of Amazon’s cargo airline, Amazon Air, and the network of airports served by the airline across the country.

“New York poses challenges like no other urbanized region,” Schwieterman said in a phone interview Monday. “Right now, Amazon Air serves the region from several more outlying points,” he said. “Long Island is a weak spot, a unique difficulty for Amazon.”

Calverton would be a good location for those reasons alone, he said, but “the ability to complement air operations with on-premises or on-airport warehouses makes it a very attractive, very attractive industrial park,” Schwieterman said.

However, Schwieterman said he has never heard of Amazon Air making a commitment several years in advance. “I just have never heard that. You know, they, one day they start service and it usually comes as a surprise,” he said. “There’s not two years of build-up where they’re putting in warehouses first.”

In addition, “Amazon is playing it safe right now, with the recent slowdown of online sales,” Schwieterman said. “It’s hard for them to plan out three or four years in this turbulent environment we’re in now.” He said he would be very surprised if the developer had anything more than “a vague expression of interest from Amazon” at this point.

“We do not currently have any plans to add this airport to our network,” Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson said Tuesday.

“The Chaddick Institute’s work does not capture the nature of Amazon Air’s business model,” Stephenson said. “Articles based on the Chaddick Institute’s assumptions can serve to mislead readers, which is the case here,” he said.

Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman said Monday he had not yet heard anything about potential use of the Calverton site for air cargo.

“We need to know the details,” Schneiderman said. “I know we like to react to things. But how many planes are going to be coming in every day?” Noise impacts will depend on the directions in which planes are flying, he said.

“Traffic is a nightmare,” Schneiderman said. “The intermodal aspect of it may be beneficial,” he said, referring to the potential to use the rail line at the site to move cargo.

“I don’t want to be too quick to criticize a proposal in another town without having the details and allowing them to make a presentation. There might be pros and cons and it all should be evaluated and I’m sure would be evaluated through the SEQRA process,” he said.

“If it’s a very limited number of planes per day, it may not be the worst thing if it’s reducing traffic and making life more livable,” Schneiderman said. “But you have to look at what the noise impacts would be. If you start out with one or two planes per day, will that change? It has to be subject to an analysis. Southampton would be an interested party and we would have to look at it in terms of its impacts on Southampton,” he said.

“Really, the devil is in the details,” Schneiderman said.

CAT’s application to the Riverhead IDA for financial assistance is currently under review. The agency has appointed a law firm as transaction counsel to assist in the review. The law firm has hired or will hire accountants to review the applicant’s financial information.

The IDA informed its auditors it anticipates approving the application and closing the deal in October, according to the agency’s audit report for the 2022 fiscal year, which ended December 31.

It is required by law to hold a public hearing on the application before acting on it.