Clear The Air On The Airport

Will the real East Hampton Airport plan please stand up?

With a new Democratic majority on the incoming Town Board, it is likely that the Republican-backed repaving and revamping of the main airport runway will not go forward as planned. Supervisor Cathy Lester has vowed to see this controversial airport improvement scaled back and is to meet today with Federal Aviation Administration representatives to explore the options.

The underlying question is whether, if the runway work is done according to the specifications in the contract (which originally had bipartisan approval), it would facilitate the expansion of the airport itself, in keeping with what some believe to be the F.A.A.'s agenda, or would simply provide a needed measure of safety for the larger planes that land there now.

As to the long-range future of the airport, a new master plan, with a full impact study done under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, is a necessity. But those who use the airport and those who are affected by it deserve to have straightforward answers to a host of immediate questions. The series of contentious Town Board sessions about the airport and the hyperbole of election rhetoric did nothing but sow confusion.

Give the public a chance to stand up and say: Spell it out for us. The F.A.A. and the airport manager and the town's consulting engineers may say what most people want to hear and they may not. At least both sides, whether they are for or against improvements, will gain a better understanding of the issues and the costs, and be able to debate more knowledgeably in the future.

Although Supervisor Lester's re-election was probably not the referendum on the runway project that some would have us believe, airport improvement was surely a major issue of the campaign. Everyone had an opinion about it. Before we go much further, let's have the facts instead.

Supervisor Lester has invited only the Town Board's other Democrat, Councilman Peter Hammerle, and the newly elected Job Potter, to the meeting today with F.A.A. officials. She justifies the exclusion of the board's two Republicans, Len Bernard, Nancy McCaffrey, and Tom Knobel, and the incoming Republican Councilwoman Pat Mansir on the grounds that the Democrats need to be brought up to date.

So does everyone else. What is needed is not a tˆte-...-tˆte among a few officials, nor, as some suggest, a formal public hearing (which would be premature in the absence of a new airport master plan), but an informational, give-and-take exchange with the F.A.A. - call it a town meeting for want of a better phrase - to clear the air.

And the sooner the better; delay only adds the notion that someone, somewhere, is hiding something.