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East Hampton Airport East Hampton Airport
A judge has issued a temporary restraining order blocking East Hampton Town from closing East Hampton Airport tomorrow night, May 17, at midnight.
New York State Supreme Court Justice Paul J. Baisley issued his ruling at about 5 p.m. on Monday afternoon, following hearings in a Riverhead courtroom earlier in the day.
The ruling puts on ice the town’s plans to close the airport for 33 hours in order to transition it to a private facility and impose new flight restrictions on hold until at least May 26th, when the two sides will again appear before Judge Baisley to argue their respective cases.
The town had planned to close the airport at midnight Tuesday, May 17, reopening on Thursday, May 19 at 9 a.m. as a legally private airport with overnight curfews, limits on the number of flights an aircraft can make, and a ban on very large private jets.
Three groups of airport users and local residents filed separate lawsuits challenging the move under the state’s environmental review laws, claiming the town had not adequately considered the potential adverse impacts of imposing flight restrictions on other regions of the South Fork where flights pushed out of East Hampton might flock to instead.
Three previous judges had recused themselves from the case for various conflicts of interest before the case landed on Justice Baisely’s desk last week. Late on Friday the judge granted the plaintiffs in the case a hearing on a request for temporary injunction, over the objections of attorneys for the town who said the TRO request had already been discarded by a previous judge. The plaintiffs noted that the previous TRO request had actually been withdrawn voluntarily.
News of the TRO being issued hit just as attorneys for the town and the National Business Aviation Association were getting started with a hearing on a second TRO request in federal court.
After being sent Justice Baisley’s ruling, District Court Judge Joanna Seybert said that in light of the TRO being granted in the state court there was no reason to continue with the federal hearing. Attorneys for the NBAA said they were concerned that the town could seek a stay in state court that would allow the closure to go through.
One of the town’s attorneys, Andrew Barr of the California firm Cooley LLP that has shepherded the town through the public-private transition scheme, said that the town would comply with Justice Baisley’s ruling as long it is in place but that, indeed, it’s possible the town could turn to another state court for a stay on Baisley’s order.
“They have the ability to seek a stay in state court — but I don’t know if they will do that,” Barr said. “Perhaps as far as hearing the case from NBAA, perhaps we should assume the town is going to move forward.”
He also said that there may have been steps taken by the FAA in preparation for the closure that could pose safety concerns. Last month the FAA issued a notice to aviators that the airport would be closed on May 18th.
Just before the ruling came down, East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said that hoped the judges hearing the injunction requests would allow the town to move forward, because ultimately reining in aircraft traffic will serve the desires of the aviation groups better.
“I hope this does not happen, because it really jeopardizes the future of the airport,” he said. “If we are not able to make reasonable and meaningful changes, permanently closing the airport becomes a real possibility.”
A national aviation organization on Saturday asked a federal court to block East Hampton Town from transitioning East Hampton Airport from a public to private facility this week and imposing new restrictions on aircraft — on the basis that the town was told in 2017 that it could not impose similar restrictions.
The National Business Aviation Association, an advocacy group for a broad consortium of aviation industry businesses, filed two motions in U.S. District Court on Saturday, one accusing the town of contempt of court for proposing to enact essentially some of the same rules that the court had barred it from enforcing in 2017 and a second asking for a temporary restraining order blocking the town from closing the facility for 33 hours this week, as planned.
“Despite the critical role that the airport plays in the local economy and the national aviation system, the town has hatched its latest scheme to restrict operations there to appease certain constituents,” the lawsuit reads. “Previously prevented by this court and the Second Circuit from imposing restrictions at the airport because it failed to comply with the Airport Noise and Capacity Act … the Town Board has now conjured a new plan to impose noise and access restrictions through a 33-hour paper closure.”
The lawsuit claims that the town’s plans to close the 84-year-old public airport at midnight this coming Tuesday, May 17, and then reopen it as a technically “new” airport at 9 a.m. on May 19 would not free the town from having to comply with the ANCA.
In their filings, the NBAA attorneys asked the court for an expedited review of its requests in light of the looming closure plans.
In 2014 the town adopted a two-tiered curfew system for the airport and a rule limiting any aircraft with a noise signature over 91-decibels — which captured most helicopters and jets but not many small propeller planes — to no more than one takeoff and one landing at the airport per week.
The rules were challenged in federal court by a pilots group and several aviation businesses. A judge initially allowed the two curfews to be enacted but blocked the limitation on flights from the outset. After two years of legal jousting — during which the curfews were enforced at the airport — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the town did not have the power to impose any limitations on flights at the airport without the permission of the Federal Aviation Administration. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the ruling.
But last September the town was given a new option. Because it had been 20 years since the town last accepted grant money from the FAA, it was freed from the guarantees that came with those grants that the airport would remain open and operational — the town now has the power to close Long Island’s oldest airport.
Over the last year, town officials say they have negotiated with the FAA on their proposal to technically close the airport briefly and then reopen it as an entirely new facility — a “private” one — that can impose limits under a “prior permission required” system that allows the operator to dictate what types of aircraft can use the airfield and when.
The Town Board last month adopted the package of rules that it plans to impose starting Thursday: including curfews from 8 p.m. to 9 a.m., limiting flights by loud aircraft to one takeoff and landing per day and barring the largest private jets entirely.
The NBAA argued to the court that the transition plans and the proposed new rules violate federal law and unfairly restrict an aviation industry that is protected by federal statute.
“[The] NBAA’s members do not operate aircraft pursuant to a set schedule,” the NBAA’s attorneys argued in their filing over the weekend. “Their services are provided on an ad hoc or charter basis and, therefore, they fly to and from [East Hampton] at the convenience of their clients. But under the town’s restrictions, plaintiffs members would be unable to use the airport for 13 hours on weekdays (from 8 p.m. to 9 a.m.) and 14 hours on weekends (from 7 p.m. to 9 a.m.).
“The curfews,” the argument continues, “would even prevent plaintiff’s members or customers from, for example, departing [East Hampton] at an hour sufficient to arrive in a New York City office at the start of an ordinary workday.”
A New York State Supreme Court justice on Friday afternoon granted the plaintiffs in three lawsuits against East Hampton Town an opportunity to make their case for a temporary restraining order that would block the town from closing East Hampton Airport next Tuesday night as planned.
In orders issued late on Friday afternoon, Justice Paul J. Baisley scheduled oral arguments in all three parallel lawsuits against the town for Monday morning at 11:30 a.m. in Riverhead.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are the charter aircraft booking company Blade, a group of airplane hangar owners called East End Hangars and an organization called the Coalition To Keep East Hampton Airport Open, as well as several private citizens who live near airfields in Montauk, Southampton and Westhampton.
The lawsuits claim that East Hampton Town did not adequately consider the potential impacts its plan to close the airport temporarily and reopen it as a private airport with new restrictions on flights would have at other airports in the region. The plaintiffs have asked the justice to block the closure — which is to go into effect from midnight on May 17 to 9 a.m. on May 19 — from going forward until the merits of the lawsuits can be argued.
The town has said the planned new rules will be a test of how restrictions might tone down the noise impacts of the airport on neighborhoods beneath flight paths and will be adjusted in the future as necessary to tamp down noise further or to ease impacts on other regions.
Attorneys for the charter aircraft booking company Blade and their co-plaintiffs in three lawsuits against East Hampton Town made a new request in state court on Thursday for a justice to halt the town’s plans to close East Hampton Airport briefly next Tuesday night.
The attorneys filed a motion in state Supreme Court Thursday morning requesting Justice Paul J. Baisley issue a temporary restraining order, or TRO, blocking the town from closing the airport for one day next week, as part of a plan to reclassify the airfield and impose new restrictions on flights.
Attorneys for the town quickly responded, arguing to Baisley that a previous judge in the case, Justice Joseph Santorelli had already denied a TRO request from the three groups of plaintiffs — Blade, a group of airport hangar owners, a grassroots group and more than two dozen residents who live near other airfields and helipads in the region — and that the matter should not be eligible to be looked at again.
“Petitioners’ TRO requests present an unlawful attempt to have a second bite at the apple and obtain relief from this Court that Petitioners were already denied by another judge,” one of the town’s attorneys, Phillip Bowman from the California law firm Cooley LLP wrote to Baisley, who is the fourth judge to preside over the three parallel lawsuits after Santorelli and two others recused themselves from the suits. “As the Court is aware, all three sets of Petitioners sought TROs in February 2022 and all three requests were denied by Justice Santorelli.”
In a letter to the justice, James Catterson, one of the attorneys for East End Hangars, a consortium of East Hampton Airport hangar owners who are the lead plaintiffs in one of the suits, argued that Santorelli had not, in fact, denied the TRO the plaintiffs had initially requested.
The TRO request had actually been dropped by the plaintiffs, Catterson said, after the town pledged that it would not seek to close the airport prior to May 17.
“While the Town has touted Petitioners’ voluntary withdrawal of the request for a TRO … as a victory in the press, counsel’s repeated representation of same before this Court is inexcusable,” Catterson wrote in a letter to Baisley on Thursday afternoon, “and [the town’s attorney] certainly knows that the voluntary withdrawal was not a denial and is not the law of the case.”
At the time the plaintiffs agreed to withdraw the TRO, there were months of expected court appearances and opportunities for the merits of the plaintiffs’ arguments to be fleshed out before the airport were to close. But the attorneys have never appeared in court. More than two months after the case began, Santorelli abruptly recused himself from the case, for unspecified reasons. Then two other justices did the same after each being on the case for only about a week.
Baisley became the judge of record for the case only on Monday and one of his first order of business was to postpone a hearing that had been scheduled for Tuesday until May 19, the day the town is set to reopen the airport.
The town’s plans are to close the airport briefly and reopen it as a legally new airport, recategorized as a private airfield rather than a public one operating under a “prior permission required” system that would allow the town to impose new restrictions on the number and type of aircraft that can use the airport. The proposed rules the town has adopted would impose overnight curfews, limit commercial aircraft and most helicopters to one flight per day and ban the largest private jets. Town consultants have said the rules would reduce aircraft traffic at the airport by as much as 40 percent.
“There is no dispute that, absent a TRO, the Town will close the Airport on May 17, causing ‘irreparable harm’ and significant adverse impacts the Town concedes will result from the diversion of traffic and noise to neighboring communities,” Blade attorney Randy Mastro wrote to Judge Baisely on Thursday. “There is also no reason why the Town cannot simply forbear for a short period of time, and maintain the status quo, by keeping this airport open to the public, as it has been for the past 85 years. The town’s heavy-handed attempt to rush through irreversible changes to make its closure plan a fait accompli without having done any of the searching environmental review that New York law requires is both unconscionable and unfair to this court.”
The three lawsuits filed in mid-February claimed that the town had violated state law in proposing the closure and new flight limits, claiming the town had not adequately examined the impacts the new airport restrictions would have on the communities surrounding other nearby airfields in Montauk, Southampton Village and Westhampton.
Bowman, the town’s attorney, argued to Baisley that irrespective of the dispute over whether the previous TRO requests had been denied or not, the subject matter of the lawsuits should not warrant a TRO being put in place while the merits of the case are argued — a process that could take months or years — because the town’s plan was a simple matter of elected officials executing their duties and that the airport transition does not pose such a threatening circumstance as to warrant the extreme measure of issuing a TRO.
Catterson said this claim was also misguided, possibly because the California attorneys were not familiar with New York State process.
“A temporary restraint order may be granted pending a hearing a for a preliminary injunction where it appears that immediate and reparable injury, loss or damage will result unless the defendant is restrained before the hearing can be held,” he wrote, quoting from state law. “In light of the fact that the preliminary injunction motion will not be heard until after the town deactivates [the] airport, petitioners now must bring an application for interim relief.”
The town’s attorney also noted that the U.S. Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration are both reviewing administrative petitions from a pair of East Hampton-based pilots who have claimed the town’s plans violate federal law. A TRO should not be considered by Baisley until those agencies have responded to the petitions, Bowman said.
Michael Wright on May 15, 2022