By THOMAS BREEN | New Haven Independent
Tweed’s airport authority is roughly a week away from submitting to the federal government a draft environmental assessment report — bringing the Morris Cove airport that much closer to realizing its plan to extend the runway and build a new, larger terminal on the East Haven side of the property.
That’s the latest with Tweed New Haven Airport’s expansion plans. East Haven town government, meanwhile, continues to push back against those plans, including in a recent written back-and-forth with the airport authority over such questions as what local approvals may be needed before a new terminal can be built. (See below for more on that.)
During a phone interview with the Independent on Tuesday, Airport Authority Executive Director Sean Scanlon said that “we are probably a week away from submitting a draft of the environmental assessment to the FAA,” or Federal Aviation Administration.
The airport authority has been working on that so-called “environmental assessment” for around a year. Scanlon explained that the federally mandated assessment looks at the likely impact of the expansion plans detailed in the master plan that the airport authority adopted back in March 2021.
At the top of the list of recommendations included in that once-a-decade master plan update is the moving of the airport’s terminal from Burr Street in New Haven across the airfield to a new and larger building on the East Haven side of the property, and extending the airport’s main runway from its current length of 5,600 feet to 6,635 feet. The Board of Alders signed off on those expansion plans in a 43-year lease between the city and the airport authority that it OK’d back in September 2021. And, after a celebratory May 2021 press conference announcing that the Goldman Sachs-owned airport management company Avports would be investing tens of millions of dollars in making that expansion plan a reality, the airport authority and Avports then signed their own 43-year “facility” agreement in August of this year.
All the while, since November 2021, the budget airline Avelo has made Tweed its “East Coast hub” and has built up its commercial airfare service out of New Haven to include nonstop flights to 14 different communities, including Orlando, Tampa Bay, Nashville, Savannah, Charleston, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Raleigh. (Even though, as the New Haven Register’s Mark Zaretsky reported on Monday, Avelo will be at least temporarily cutting back on some of its non-Florida routes over the winter. “This is not a bad sign,” Scanlon told the Independent. “They’re still talking to me about expanding routes. Things are still going very well here. Like any business, they’re making adjustments.”)
None of this teed-up expansion plan can take place, however, without the federal government signing off on the airport authority’s environmental assessment.
Thus the significance of the authority’s planned submission of a draft version of that assessment to the FAA next week or later this month after working on it for roughly a year.