Suffolk Closeup: Ending the noise nightmare

The new East Hampton Town Board has come up with a strategy to deal with what has become Long Island’s biggest noisemaker — helicopter traffic in and out of the town-owned airport in warm weather months.

The choppers fly loud and low with Shelter Island a doormat for many of their approaches and departures at the airport, just a few air miles south of the Island. The helicopters carry the well-heeled, able to pay $500 for a one-way ticket, between East Hampton and Manhattan.

To folks on the ground, the racket has been insufferable.

The current East Hampton Town Board is a dramatic contrast to the one that it replaced. It was no surprise that former East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson, after leaving office at the start of 2014, became a paid consultant to aviation interests.

East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell, his successor, and the new Democratic majority board, worked with great care through 2014, with consultants nationally known on airport noise issues, citizens’ committees and input from public hearings, to come up with a strategy to deal with what has become a noise nightmare for Shelter Island.

The proposed rules the East Hampton Town Board has just unveiled are measured, reasonable and conservative.

Critically, they include a ban on all helicopter traffic between noon Thursday to noon Monday between May 1 and September 30 and a limit during this period of one trip and one arrival a week of any aircraft defined as “noisy” by Federal Aviation Administration sound standards. (These include many choppers.)

There are penalties with teeth. Aircraft owners would be fined $1,000 for a first violation, $4,000 for the second and $10,000 for the third, and, after the fourth, would be barred from using East Hampton Airport for two years.

The title of the measure is right to the point: “A Local Law … regulating operation of noisy aircraft at East Hampton Airport.” It opens by declaring that “in the past three decades” there has been “a significant increase in noisy aircraft traffic at East Hampton Airport, chiefly helicopters, jets and seaplanes.

By their extensive complaints to the Town Board and to other governmental entities, the public has made clear, and this Town Board recognizes, the negative impact that this aircraft noise has made to the health and welfare of its citizenry, to wildlife and their habitat, as well as to the peace, quiet and repose of this region.”

“In an effort to address the impacts of aircraft noise,” it goes on, “the Town Board undertook an extensive analysis of the citizenry’s complaints, and of the aircraft traffic itself, by the town’s aviation consultants and noise engineers, the results of which have only confirmed the seriousness of the community’s noise disturbance. Of 24,000 airport noise complaints logged last year, the latest noise analysis discloses that they are overwhelmingly attributable to helicopters and jets, the noisiest types.”

Consider the next line: “Noise complaints at East Hampton Airport far exceeded the level of complaints at major airports around the country.” Wow. It’s worth repeating: Noise complaints involving East Hampton Airport “far exceeded” those “at major airports” in the U.S.

Clearly, a crisis has been sounding loud and clear.

And, says the proposed law, “in its capacity as proprietor of the East Hampton Airport, the Town Board has a public responsibility to protect residents from the adverse effects of airport noise. It has developed a set of restrictions on the use of East Hampton Airport that are reasonable, non-arbitrary and non-discriminatory.”

Aviation interests are upset over the proposed law. A grouping of them, including a bunch of non-Long Island companies that fly the choppers between Manhattan and East Hampton, have filed two lawsuits with one, in federal court, claiming the FAA should block the town’s law. The FAA, which is supposed to be a regulator of air traffic in the U.S., has long been, as with many governmental regulatory agencies, a lapdog instead of a watchdog of the industry it’s supposed to control.

Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzales, the “liaison” to the airport on the board said, “We know that some well-funded opponents will sue us — some of them have already done that — but we will not be intimidated.”

Other Long Island towns and Suffolk County government should contribute financially to assist East Hampton in this fight.

Meanwhile, last week a modification in the proposed rules was advanced by the East Hampton Town Board, and the Quiet Skies Coalition says it will mean far weaker regulations for seaplanes, turbo prop and piston aircraft. Kathleen Cunningham, chairwoman of the Wainscott-based coalition, says she is concerned “commercial aviation interests will find a way to exploit this as a loophole.”

There’s a public hearing on the proposed law scheduled for March 5  at the LTV Studio in Wainscott and a vote on it by the East Hampton Town Board will follow later in the month.