Thomas Breen / Markeshia Ricks photos
Airport authority director Scanlon: There’s a risk to doing nothing. City Plan Vice-Chair Mattison: But what about the risks of this deal?
Tweed Airport Authority
Planned partnership with Avports.
City planners advanced a proposed four-decade lease that would allow for a larger Tweed New Haven Airport, with a lingering set of questions: How financially and environmentally risky is this airport expansion plan? And how does that stack up to the costs of doing nothing?
Those questions emerged Wednesday night during the latest regular monthly City Plan Commission meeting, which was held online via Zoom.
The local land-use commissioners unanimously voted to recommend that the Board of Alders approve a new proposed 43-year accord between the city and the airport authority. That deal would result in a longer main runway, the construction of a new four-to-six gate terminal and garage on the East Haven side of the East Shore airport property, the elimination of the city’s $325,000 annual operating subsidy to Tweed, the investment of $5 million in noise, traffic, and environmental mitigation in the surrounding neighborhood, and the maintaining of “New Haven” in the airport’s name.
It would also tee up a separate 43-year sub-lease between the airport authority and the Goldman Sachs-owned company Avports, which has managed the airport since 1998 and which has promised to invest $70 million in making the planned airport expansion a reality.
The proposed lease extension, along with a related ordinance amendment removing a local weight limit for aircraft that can fly into and out of Tweed, now advances to a Board of Alders committee for a public hearing before heading to the full local legislature for a final vote.
Click here for more on the lease agreement, here for more on the airport expansion plans, and here for more on neighborhood opposition to the proposal.
Zoom
Wednesday night’s City Plan Commission meeting.
Wednesday night’s recommendation of approval by the City Plan Commission came with a caveat.
“The commission finds the order may be in the interest of the city,” Westville Alder and City Plan Commissioner Adam Marchand said as he formulated the exact wording of the commission’s advice, “and recommends that the Board of Alders consider the long-term financial implications as well as quality of life considerations and environmental impact of the project.”
The latter half of that recommendation came largely thanks to questions posed by Commission Vice-Chair Ed Mattison.
Mattison, a former city attorney and East Rock alder, said that he has seen many public-private partnerships proposed over the years. Some work out as planned, some fizzle out into nothing, “not necessarily to the fault of anybody, except for the change in economic conditions.”
So, he asked Tweed Airport Authority Executive Director Sean Scanlon and city Economic Development Administrator Mike Piscitelli on Wednesday, what are the risks of approving this 43-year proposed lease and investing so much public trust in Avports?
Piscitelli: “We’re Not Trying To Overbuild”
Thomas Breen file photo
City development chief Piscitelli at 2019 Tweed presser.
Tweed Airport Authority
First of all, Piscitelli said, it’s important to acknowledge the risks. The 43-year term of the lease is indeed a long period of time. And airports inevitably have a “significant impact” on surrounding neighborhoods.
The city is trying to “be responsive and responsible to residents near the airport,” he said, by making sure this project results in a true stormwater management program for the airport, traffic mitigation, and a significant focus on addressing general aviation noise.
“This is a fairly management amount of growth for the airport,” Piscitelli said.
The new terminal would be between four and six gates. It’s not as if Avports is asking for 20 gates and a 7,000-foot runway to make the numbers work, he said.
“We’ve managed to have a midgrowth plan for the airport so that Avports isn’t spending $200 million to make this work. It’s a much more measured approach. … We’re not trying to overbuild this airport.”
Scanlon: Status Quo “A Liability For City”
Thomas Breen photo
The current Tweed terminal.
Tweed Airport Authority
The planned new East Haven terminal.
Scanlon, meanwhile, turned Mattison’s question back at the vice-chair.
“Another question is: What is the risk to the City of New Haven if this doesn’t happen?”
Scanlon said that Tweed currently brings in about $1 million a year in revenue. That’s in comparison to nearly $3 million in annual costs for the airport. The airport currently only has one carrier, American Airlines, making one flight a day to Philadelphia. Another carrier, Avelo, is slated to come online at Tweed this fall. (Since announcing its plans to make Tweed Avelo’s new East Coast hub, the the new airline has already started cutting service elsewhere in the country.)
“If and when we continue to coast along with suboptimal performance and suboptimal interest from the national carriers because of the length of the runway and no new terminal,” Scanlon said, “the only people who suffer are the taxpayers of New Haven.”
That’s because the city technically owns the land that the airport sits on. The airport authority leases that land for $1 a year.
If the airport were to lose it’s annual $1.5 million subsidy from the state, he said, and if this private deal with Avports is turned down, “the city is on the hook. The city would have to help because they own the airport.”
“By doing this deal, we would transfer a majority of the risk from the city and the taxpayers over to a private investor that believes it can work,” he continued. “It’s a creative proposal we need in this time.”
The airport needs to try something different, Scanlon concluded, “because what is working right now at best is not working, at worst is a liability for the city.”
This Avports-led expansion deal, he said, shifts a significant amount of that liability over to a private company.
Mattison agreed with Scanlon’s reframing of the question.
One has to consider the long term fiscal costs of keeping the airport status quo, he said. And those costs are certainly not encouraging.
“But we also, when you’re looking at extremely lengthy lease terms, it is important to have a realistic view of what could go wrong and to what extent we can protect the city against that particular possibility. I’m not saying I’m opposed to doing this. I have no such feeling. My only feeling is: I want everybody to know what are the pros and the cons in a realistic fashion.”
Scanlon said he has made it his “personal mission to answer those questions” to the best of his ability over the coming weeks, months, and years.
When asked for a comment on his company’s commitment to following through on this proposed deal, Avports CEO Jorge Roberts cited his company’s management of Tweed for the past 22 years as giving them “an unmatched understanding of the airport and the physical property it resides on. Our experience managing airports around the United States has also given us a very clear understanding of federal environmental rules and processes.
“In short, we would not be making this large investment in Southern Connecticut if we didn’t believe strongly that this project can and will be done in a safe, environmentally friendly manner.”
Neither Scanlon nor Piscatelli answered the question: What's the risk? Why don't they just say what the risks are. Just answering the freaking question.
See - this is why nobody trusts Tweed or the city - officialdom obfuscates and lies and denies and refuses to directly, transparently address the concerns, answer the questions. One can like or not like the answers but at least you have the information upon which to make a decision.
Piscatelli - the guy who loves to just say yes to every deal that comes across his desk, even if it has great cost to New Haven taxpayers - refuses to say what the risk is. He's our direct employee and we need to hear a direct, clear answer.