The Town of East Hampton is caught in an all-out legal fray over roughly 600 acres nestled between some of the priciest property in the country, pitting the rich against the even richer, and multimillionaires against their billionaire neighbors.
At the crux of the dispute: the East Hampton Airport and the estimated 30,000-plus flights it handles annually. On one side, well-heeled residents living along the flight paths of private jets, helicopters, and turbo prop planes are tired of screaming poolside about rattling windows, rumbling engines and the seemingly unending disruptions the aircrafts cause. The complaints often fall on the deaf ears of their main adversaries, the highest of a high-flying jet-set supported by those locals who welcome the millions of dollars flowing from open wallets into the area economy.
Barry Raebeck, a head of Say No to KHTO, a group that has advocated for closing East Hampton Airport (known by the navigation code KHTO), summed up the fight last year: “This is not the haves versus the have nots,” he told The New York Post. “It’s the have everythings versus the have-a-lots.”
The list of those known to use the East Hampton Airport is a who’s who spanning multiple industries, from entertainers Beyonce and Jay-Z and former Google chair Eric Schmidt to New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and New York Mets owner and hedge fund manager Steve Cohen.
Boldface names or not, detractors say the issues these elites’ aircraft cause take the spotlight off what the Hamptons once was and should still be: a serene oceanside retreat. From July through the end of September 2019, a study showed 47,000 complaints were lodged in connection to aircraft using the East Hampton Airport, with most of them from 533 households. (One report claimed 44 percent of the complaints came from 10 households, and a single home was responsible for 1,811 of them). That total is up from 19,000 complaints made during the same period four years earlier, when noisier helicopter service wasn’t quite as prevalent.
Jay Schneiderman, the supervisor of the Town of Southampton, which partially lies in flight paths, acknowledged to The New York Times that “both sides are right in some respects.”
“Yes, the airport has been here a long time, but it has changed, aircraft have changed, flight patterns have changed,” he said. “It’s not really the same airport that it was.”
The bitter tug of war between the wealthiest visitors and residents who descend on the area from the skies and the coterie of frustrated, fed-up homeowners on the ground has been years in the making, and East Hampton Town appears to have known the situation would continue to deteriorate as time marched on. In a longsighted bid to gain control of the airport, East Hampton Town opted to decline federal grant money two decades ago. As a result, a contract the town had with the Federal Aviation Administration that assured the airport would remain open finally expired in September 2021.
Local officials acted fast and attempted to enact a plan to deactivate the public airport at 11:59 p.m. on May 17, reopening 33 hours later as the East Hampton Town Airport, a publicly-owned private prior-permission required facility, complete with the new identifier, JPX. The change was to allow the town to limit flights to a single takeoff and landing per aircraft per day, while also shortening operating hours and regulating aircraft based on size and noise level.
The day before the closing, however, a New York State Supreme Court Justice issued a temporary restraining order on the Town of East Hampton. Three parallel lawsuits filed on behalf of plaintiffs Blade Air Mobility, East End Hangars, the Coalition to Keep East Hampton Airport Open, and some residents in nearby communities succeeded in scuttling the plan in time for the busy summer months.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs had told the judge that East Hampton Town was illegally going ahead with the closure and reopening before completing a required environmental review of the impact the new restrictions would have on the area.
The Town of East Hampton’s outside counsel for the airport, William O’Connor, insisted the community’s board “rolled up its sleeves and studied the problem.”
“They are trying to find a compromise,” O’Connor said. “And in any good compromise, there will be people [who are] very unhappy.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyers dismissed counterarguments as “gibberish,” “brazen,” and “scheming.”
For now, at least, the so-called “have everythings” continue to fly in and out of East Hampton Airport. But while that battle is won, the war is far from over, and the town has reserved the right to go beyond past attempts to make it a private facility that would restrict flights.
If issues continue to grow, “this airport will close,” O’Connor warned in court. “There is nothing under the law, federal or state, that requires us to maintain this airport or keep it open.”
At the end of June, the Town of East Hampton announced another step backward in its fight against disruptive aircraft, though: Extensive negotiations to purchase Montauk Airport that began in 2019 fell through, and the facility went to a private buyer.
