'Temporary' Closure Of Airport Could Give East Hampton More Control

If East Hampton Town officials were to close East Hampton Airport at some point after this coming September — when it will have the power to do so for the first time in decades — the facility could then be re-opened in the future with new restrictions in place limiting who could use its runways and tarmacs, a consultant told the town Tuesday, May 11.

Closing the airport for “a measurable amount of time” and then reopening it would free the town from the restrictions of federal laws that currently limit its ability to restrict access at the airport, the town’s aviation attorney, Bill O’Connor, told members of Town Board on Tuesday during an hours-long work session exploring the past, present and future of the airport in East Hampton.

Mr. O’Connor, who has been helping the town craft a strategy to reduce the noise impacts of the airport on neighborhoods around the East End, said that other avenues to reining in aircraft traffic, particularly the heavy flow of charter helicopters and seaplanes in the summer season, have proven to be costly and unlikely to earn the same sweeping power that a temporary closure of the facility appears to be able to.

“From a legal perspective, it’s pretty straightforward: the airport may legally close after the grants expire in September 2021,” Mr. O’Connor said, referring to the 20-year demands of continued operations that came with the last multi-million-dollar grants the town accepted for maintenance work from the Federal Aviation Administration. “[The Airport Noise and Capacity Act] should not apply if the town closes the airport and then decides to re-open it in the future with restricted access as a public or private use airport. Upon reopening, we will have the ability to introduce new restrictions as a condition of the opening.”

Mr. O’Connor, who works for the California-based law firm Cooley LLP, said that the town could craft the restrictions it wanted to impose to suit how it sees the airport going forward. For the purposes of an economic study Cooley commissioned on the airport’s monetary value to the town, Mr. O’Connor said they envisioned a hypothetical restriction against all commercial aircraft that barred all chartered aircraft flights, including “shared” corporate jets but not jets owned by a corporation for the use of its employees.

Such a restriction would still allow flights by the wealthy owners of helicopters and jets and by the smaller private pilots who made up the vast majority of the airport’s flights prior to the early 2000s — and again in 2020 when the pandemic grounded the charter fleets.

Town Board members were quick to point out that they have made no decision on whether the airport would be closed at all, when a temporary closure would take place if they did choose to take that tack, or how restrictions might be crafted and said that the decision would only come after extensive public discussion.

“We don’t have a hard stop deadline in September of this year, when the grant assurances expire,” Councilman Jeff Bragman, the Town Board’s airport liaison said. “We have not made up our minds … It is not written in stone, it is not the Ten Commandments. People will have comments and critiques and questions and the understanding will evolve. We need to hear input from the public. It may be correct that the two extreme positions are maintaining the status quo or closing the airport, but there are a lot gradations in between. There’s time, and we are going to do this carefully and thoughtfully.”

But the revelation of the possible new tactic was met with a panicked burst of outcry from Montauk, where a wave of opposition to closing the East Hampton Airport has been steadily building over fears that doing so would send more air traffic to Montauk’s small airport.

“We have great empathy for the people who have been speaking and the difficult terms they are living with underneath the airport — no one should have to live with that,” said Tom Bogdan, founder of a Montauk citizens group called Montauk United. “I, for one, and the group I represent … support them in any and every way possible to solve that problem. But closing the airport is not the answer. All you would be doing is transferring the problem to another geographic area of the town of East Hampton.”

Lou Cortese, a Montauk residents and member of the town Planning Board, likened the town’s position to that of King Solomon facing two women both claiming to be a baby’s mother.

“If you choose to adhere to the demands of the people who live near the airport, by closing the airport, and those flights get diverted to Montauk, you still have the same problem,” said Mr. Cortese, who also sits on the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee, which signed a letter to the town last month officially opposing any consideration of closing East Hampton Airport. “So, I don’t envy the decision you have to face.”

Town Board members said that Cooley will be commissioning a “diversion study” that would examine exactly how much of the East Hampton Airport’s existing aircraft traffic could or would choose to fly to the Montauk airport if the East Hampton tarmac was closed.

Observers noted that there would be some limitations to Montauk’s accepting much of East Hampton’s current traffic. Montauk airport’s 3,200-foot runway is not large enough for larger jets to land or take off on, offers only very limited options taking off in shifting winds and the airport’s much smaller tarmac would limit the number of charter seaplanes and helicopters that could use the facility at any one time.

Others noted that the airport sits in an area that is not closely surrounded by residential homes and would allow almost all aircraft to approach over open water and that it’s far-flung location would make it far less attractive to those who currently fly to East Hampton Airport but then travel west to homes in eastern Southampton Town and might be more likely to base their travel out of Gabreski Airport in Westhampton.

Mr. O’Connor’s suggestion was the latest in a long and circuitous trail the town has blazed since 2014 trying to find a route to tamp down the din of helicopter blades over East End neighborhoods on summer weekends.

After a year of heated debates in 2015, the town imposed curfews and a limitation on the number of flights an aircraft could make into the airport. The new laws were immediately challenged in court by deep-pocketed aviation companies and the curfews were only allowed to take effect through the summers of 2016 and 2017.

Ultimately, a federal court ruled that the Airport Noise and Capacity Act, a 1990 law adopted specifically to block local municipalities from imposing a hodgepodge of restrictions on airports, barred the town from imposing the curfews and any limitations on air traffic.

The town then explored applying to the FAA for permission to impose restrictions — an approach that could have taken a decade to navigate and cost several million dollars and would have been unlikely to result in much more than new curfews, Mr. O’Connor told the board in 2019.

The town also hired lobbyists to appeal to members of Congress for the adoption of legislation that would sidestep the FAA authority and specifically gave the town the power to limit use of the airport. That approach, while still technically on the table, could also be a long one, Mr. O’Connor said, with uncertain results.

The prospect of the airport’s closure as an option came into focus in 2018, when the town hired Mr. O’Connor, touting among his bonifides having helped another municipality to close down its airport. The town has waved the specter of closure in the years since, sometimes as a cudgel and sometimes as a bargaining chip, in trying to get the problematic airport users — charter helicopter pilots, mainly — to voluntarily tamp down their noise impacts.

The tactic has worked to an extent. Aviation groups like the Eastern Region Helicopter Council have worked with airport management to devise new routes that keep helicopters over water as much as possible and ask that pilots “fly neighborly” by not approaching the airport at low altitudes.

Most recently, a group has introduced a new “Pilots Pledge” that has been circulated among the airport’s users by the East Hampton Community Alliance and calls on pilots to follow a much more strict set of flight terms, including an almost complete curfew from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m.

On Tuesday, an aviation advocate made a pitch to the town that the segment of the industry that uses the airport was taking major new steps to reducing their noise footprint on the communities of the East End, including the pilots pledge and a new user group committee that will hold monthly meetings open to the public to garner input and discuss openly the efforts pilots are making to reduce noise.

But many in the anti-airport movement, which has spawned its own bevy of community organizations, have moved beyond just the matter of noise in their arguments for the airport’s complete and permanent closure, to problems they see as non-remediable, like air pollution.

“Closing the airport is not extreme in any way,” Barry Raebeck, a founder of the group Say No To KHTO, a reference to the airport’s FAA call-sign, said in a nod to Mr. Bragman’s opening assessment of the town’s options. “It’s protecting our community now and in perpetuity. Doing that is not extreme, it’s simply common sense.”