The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Stop the friction, expand Tweed
Waiting for the noon American Eagle arrival on a gunmetal gray weekday, the view of Tweed-New Haven Airport comes alive through windows of the old tower, now the office of Timothy Larson.
From that perch, we can see the workings of a sleepy airport terminal ready for more action, the main runway leading toward a neighborhood on the New HavenEast Haven line and the rows of houses directly across Burr Street from the terminal.
As the Bombardier jet breaks through the clouds on the way from Philadelphia, Larson — executive director of the authority that operates the New Haven-owned airport — talks about expansion.
“Southwest would come in and JetBlue would come in if we had 6,100 feet of takeoff,” Larson said. “They’ve all said ‘As soon as you get 6,000 feet, call me and we’ll talk.’ ”
Right now the runway has 5,250 feet of usable “takeoff ” length. Expanding it can’t happen fast enough.
Tweed, which straddles New Haven and East Haven, is now home to three flights a day on American Eagle, each taking up to 50 passengers to or from Philadelphia. That’s a nice service to a great city of sports and history with connecting flights, but Philly is hardly the nation’s best airline hub.
Tweed needs flights to places like Washington, D.C., and Chicago, not to mention Florida, if it’s going to be a truly functional, regional airport, not just a bus station with wings. Making that happen means much more than adding 1,000 feet of pavement to the main, 150-foot-wide, milelong runway.
What’s the holdup? The neighbors don’t like the noise as it stands now, let alone more. The airport was built 80 years ago on basically a swamp, still features sensitive wetlands that we can’t just fill in like we did in the bad old days, especially just a few blocks from Long Island Sound.
To reach the terminal, passengers drive through a full-on residential neighborhood — not a highway exit, not a commercial district with houses.
We’ll know a lot more after Wednesday , when the city of New Haven — under Mayor Toni Harp, who favors expansion — presents its benefits plan for neighbors at 6 p.m. in City Hall. That plan should address property tax issues, traffic, wetlands and other concerns, but paying for it is no easy matter.
Already under way is a noise abatement program in which 184 houses will be outfitted with insulation, windows, doors and new cooling systems to keep noise out. That’s financed by the Federal Aviation Administration, which would also pay for most of the $12 million cost of expanding the runway. (Don’t ask; I went over it with Larson and it’s not like building a parking lot.)
The problem is, no matter what measures the city offers, to do its job, Tweed needs to expand more than many people say they can tolerate — maybe 10 times more than the 30,000 or so passengers a year who fly in and out now.
What is the airport’s job? Simply put, it must become an economic engine for southern Connecticut. I just said Tweed needs more and bigger flights. Correct that: Connecticut needs Tweed to have those flights because Connecticut needs businesses and residents who want to be in and around its most cosmopolitan city.
Companies such as Alexion, let alone the Amazons and Googles of the world, can no longer make a long-term commitment to a place where their employees need to drive an hour to an airport.
Part of the answer, as state Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, D-New Haven, puts it, is serious public transit to and from Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks. But an expanded Tweed is also part of the answer, as more than one study group has concluded.
As it stands now, New Haven is either the biggest or the second biggest metro area in the United States that doesn’t have a robust airport. Yale alone, between the university and the sprawling hospital, would support an airport of modest size.
It’s not like Tweed would
have to find customers. More than 4 million passenger trips a year are made by people who live closer to Tweed than to any other airport, according to the Tweed authority, citing studies.
One of them on a recent 12:30 p.m. flight was Jared Katz, a massage therapist and former corporate trainer from Milford, taking his 7-year-old daughter, Indira, to Arizona. “It’s the first time we’ve been able to do a trip out of New Haven,” he said, because of scheduling and cost. “It would be great to have more direct flights.”
How to make that happen? What we have now is a mess: a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals, in which the airport authority claims a state ban on Tweed runway expansion is illegal; competing bills in the General Assembly; neighbors unhappy over the pace and quality of offers for benefits; and open issues on wetlands and traffic.
There’s a general sense that the lawmakers whose districts cover the airport are quietly blocking any attempts to expand. I talked with Looney, who lives a few blocks away; Sen. Len Fasano, of North Haven, the Republican president protempore; and Rep. James Albis, a ranking Democrat from East Haven. That’s a lot of firepower but I don’t see them as obstructionists.
All three said they are open to a proportionate expansion if and only if a plan addresses local concerns.
“No one should be cavalier about just saying ‘well, the neighborhood should just put up with it,’ ” Looney said. “You’re talking about a neighborhood that is substantial ... one of the most stable neighborhoods in the city.”
Albis said, “One of the biggest problems is that over the years the city of New Haven has made a lot of promises regarding Tweed that have not come to fruition. There is a real lack of trust.”
All of that has to end, starting Wednesday. Larson, who’s also a state senator, a Democrat from East Hartford, suggests moving the terminal to the East Haven side of the airport, in a commercial district with a direct shot up to I-95. That’s a good idea, but expensive.
A major expansion needs to happen. Tweed in the ‘90s had as many as four airlines, but the economics changed and now it needs to upgrade if it wants more flights.
No, Tweed can’t run roughshod over its neighbors and no, it can’t ever be anything close to the 7 million passengers a year at Bradley. But two neighborhoods can’t hold up economic progress in a state that’s sucking wind, turning to its liveliest city to bring it up to speed.
Airports are not hood ornaments for cities, they are engines.