Paul Bass photo
All aboard one of the many new flights leaving from Tweed.
Brian Slattery photo
Tweed Director Tom Rafter: "There's a number of different ways this could go."
It’s time to wait and see what the feds decide.
Tweed New Haven Airport Authority Executive Director Tom Rafter urged that patience and provided other process updates as he told a crowd of roughly 100 people at a contentious annual meeting that federal regulators should weigh in later this summer on the potential environmental impacts of the Morris Cove airport’s planned expansion.
That mandated airport-community meeting took place on Wednesday at Nathan Hale School at 480 Townsend Ave. It was attended by about 100 people, around half from New Haven and half from East Haven (which also stands to be most directly affected by the Tweed expansion) and other shoreline towns.
It was the latest public hearing about the expansion project since a meeting in early April, attended by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials, in which the airport’s draft Environmental Assessment (EA) was roundly criticized by East Haven public officials and citizens from several towns. Read more here about that meeting, at which critics were united in pushing for an environmental impact survey (EIS), a more robust review of the project’s potential effects than an EA.
The EA at that point — covering plans to construct a new four-gate terminal on the East Haven side of the Morris Cove airport property and to extend the airport’s main runway to attract more commercial airline traffic — found that the expansion would reduce noise and air pollution.
Critics accused that EA of“greenwashing.” Supporters described it as reflecting the realities of a growing airport. (Click here to read a previous Independent article about that; click here to read the 206-page draft EA in full.) April’s meeting was part of a 60-day period in which the public could offer feedback about the EA; that period ended in May.
The number of flights in and out of Tweed, meanwhile, has risen considerably since November 2021, when the new budget airline Avelo made New Haven one of its hubs. It has nonstop flights to several cities and has served well over one million customers.
At Wednesday's Nathan Hale-hosted meeting.
During the 60-day feedback period, Rafter said at Wednesday’s meeting, Avports received “just under 1,000” comments about the Tweed EA. It has “to respond or address each and every one of those,” and “that information is supposed to be transmitted to the FAA within the next two weeks.”
After that, “the FAA will have a decision back to us by, hopefully, mid-August, mid-summer sometime.” At that time, the FAA could decide to require an EIS, or impose additional conditions on the project, Rafter said. It could also accept the EA as is, allowing Tweed to continue with its expansion efforts as currently planned.
“There’s a number of different ways this could go,” Rafter said. The information about the FAA’s decision will be made public, including on Tweed New Haven Airport’s website.
City Engineer Zinn (center), Mayor Elicker (third from right), and Wendy Hamilton (in the helmet.)
Over nearly two hours of questions and comments on Wednesday, the people assembled in the Nathan Hale cafeteria made plain their continued anger at the direction of the project, which was, if anything, more acute that the anger shown at the meeting in April.
Many expressed the sense of a lack of transparency and accountability on the part of the city government and Tweed. Several Morris Cove and East Haven residents who live close to the airport raised issues about increased noise; fumes from the airplanes’ engines, especially when idling near the terminal; increased traffic on roads leading to the airport; and trash left on neighboring streets by people getting picked up by Uber, which (unlke Lyft) has not paid to let its drivers access the airport directly.
They questioned whether the benefits to the city of New Haven were worth the costs the communities immediately adjacent to the airport, or in the planes’ flight paths, were already paying.
“Either side” of the airport, said Gary Gosselin, who lives close to Tweed, “is a residential neighborhood. You can’t change that.” An East Haven resident, visibly angrier than Gosselin, put it more bluntly to New Haven and Avports officials: “You cannot do what you want to do in our town. It’s totally wrong.”
Mayor Elicker.
Referring to the “growing pains” associated with the increased activity at Tweed, Mayor Justin Elicker said: “I get it” that “people think we haven’t done enough,” even as he stressed that he had assembled a “team” of city officials who were working to address people’s concerns.
Regarding the environmental and health impacts an expansion of Tweed might have, he said, “I probe my conscience all the time… I’m not interested in political posturing, and whether it is an EIS or an EA” that guides Tweed’s expansion “is an FAA decision.”
He added that “there’s this question that’s come up about, overall, the airport and its environmental impact. I think that’s a real question we all should be struggling with.… That’s what we’re doing as a city. That’s why we created a climate office and put $5 million into climate. That’s why we’re looking to launch a solar initiative around the city. That why we’re doing a lot of active transportation.… It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have a viable airport in our city.”
Do I dare ask the context in which a Mayoral Candidate is wearing space helmets to public forums?