Airport Limits to Get Airing Tonight

East Hampton Town officials are bracing for a large turnout tonight at a hearing on four proposed regulations that would cut back on traffic to East Hampton Airport in order to reduce noise.

The proposed ban on helicopter use of the airport from Thursday through Monday in season — May 1 to Sept. 30 — accompanied by a once-a-week round-trip limit on other craft defined as noisy and a year-round mandatory overnight curfew with extended hours for noisy airplanes, has many seeking an opportunity to voice support and dissent.

At a work session on Tuesday, town board members heard a report on airport statistics for 2014 and a preliminary analysis of where else aircraft might land. The potential for increased traffic at the privately owned Montauk Airport is worrying many residents of that hamlet.

Potential responses to the proposed East Hampton Airport restrictions, said Marguerite Wolffsohn, the town’s planning director, include the use of quieter aircraft, switching from helicopters to fixed-wing planes, changing the timing of flights to comply with restrictions, reducing the number of trips here, coming by highway or rail instead, and diverting to another airport in the region. Those, besides Montauk, include Gabreski Airport in Westhampton Beach and a heliport in Southampton.

That choice, she said, will depend on variables such as passengers’ final destination, the amenities, including fuel, offered at various airports, and weather constraints.

The town board did not get a report on Tuesday, however, from a committee charged with evaluating the financial impact of the proposed regulations. That group was to address several questions. Could the airport be financially self-sustaining under the new rules, given an expected drop in revenue resulting from fewer landing fees? Would it have enough money coming in to cover not only operating expenses but an anticipated $7 million in needed capital improvements, as well as an estimated $3 million in legal fees resulting from lawsuits?

Aviation industry opponents have homed in on the landing-fee question as key, charging that the loss of income from those fees, along with the town’s decision not to accept any more Federal Aviation Administration airport grants, will spell the demise of the airport — which some say is the underlying motive of the new policies. (Refusing F.A.A. grants makes it easier for a town to assert its own authority over its airport.)

An airport finance committee had already unanimously concluded that even with a significant reduction in traffic and landing fees, the airport could be self-sustaining, and the cost of capital improvements covered. The town board requested a new look, however, taking into account the specifics of the proposed regulations. But a stalemate among members led this week to the committee’s making no new report at all.

“The committee has been unable to reach a consensus on a five-year earnings and cash flow forecast if the proposed rules are implemented,” Arthur Malman, the chair of the town’s budget and finance committee, wrote in a March 2 memo to the town board. While some committee members believed that a five-year financial forecast could be developed, others opposed trying, believing that should the new rules take effect, “the variables, especially after the 2015 summer season, are too great and/or further data, research, and perspectives from industry experts as well as experimentation with all or some of the proposed rules, is needed.”

In an effort to bring those of varying viewpoints to the table to hammer out an agreement on the long-simmering issues, Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, the town board’s airport liaison, had established two airport subcommittees, one representing aviation interests and the other concerned with noise abatement, to work in tandem with the airport finance committee, whose members represent diverse interests. The goal was to agree on a set of objective facts, in light of which the board could set airport policy. Only findings on which there was consensus were to be presented to the board.

That process resulted in an impasse. In an email to the town board, David Gruber, a committee member and chair of the noise subcommittee, used less measured terms than Mr. Malman in describing what had happened.

Various financial models, using different variables, all indicated that the airport could be financially independent and cover expected costs under the new regulations, he said. But “the aviation side,” he charged, was unhappy with that conclusion and requested models of other airport scenarios be tested, and caveats included in the report to the town board.

“When none of that succeeded in derailing the report,” he wrote, some committee members adopted the position that financial analysis of the airport after the imposition of rules restricting traffic there is currently impossible.

“This is, of course, absurd,” he wrote.

“In fact, almost every plausible (and implausible) outcome can easily be modeled for its financial effects. But the scenarios that would have shown the airport as not financially sustainable would have been so obviously outlandish as to defeat their purpose — to make the airport under the proposed rules appear unsustainable. Hence, they insisted upon no report at all.”

In a release on Tuesday, Loren Riegelhaupt, who heads an aviation group called Friends of the East Hampton Airport, cast the situation differently. “Ongoing concerns about the true economic impacts of these bans forced the committee to admit they could not reach consensus,” he said. He called the situation “a major blow to the town board’s plan to ban flights,” and called on the town board “to postpone any vote on these restrictions so the people of East Hampton can get a full and fair analysis of what these restrictions mean for our community, property taxes, local businesses, and economy.”

In the face of the stalemate, the noise-abatement subcommittee submitted its own findings to the board. “We believe the financial facts remain clear,” Mr. Gruber told the board in a submission accompanied by a spreadsheet.

The group “had previously opined that the airport can be self-sustaining without need of F.A.A. grants or taxpayer subsidies. That remains the case,” he wrote — even factoring in the capital improvement and litigation costs.

The rules as proposed, he said, would result in an approximately 43-percent decline in airport income, which could be made up in a variety of ways, among them raising landing fees and establishing new revenue sources such as paid airport parking and new leases of airport land.

With a 2014 total of 25,646 “operations” (takeoffs or landings), traffic at the airport increased by 23 percent over 2013, Jemille Charlton, its manager, told the board Tuesday. Helicopter traffic increased by 47 percent. Of the total number of operations, the majority, 18,820, involved transient aircraft rather than locally based planes.

Also this week, Congressman Lee Zeldin sent a letter to Michael P. Huerta, the F.A.A. administrator, asking the F.A.A. to immediately address “the pervasive problem of excessive helicopter noise” over the East End. The F.A.A., he said, should enforce minimum altitude rules and institute standards regarding the transition points where helicopters veer off a mandated over-water route along the North Shore toward their destinations.

Congressman Zeldin, vice chairman of the House subcommittee on aviation, also asked that the F.A.A. abide by a 2012 letter in which it promised former Congressman Tim Bishop that, for as long as East Hampton Town continued to decline F.A.A. grants, the federal agency would not, under particular circumstances, move against the town for instituting airport use restrictions designed to mitigate noise.