Airport foes face test of alliance

Opponents of growth for Logan, Hanscom stay united - shakily

By Alan Lupo, Globe Staff, 9/17/2000

A fault line has appeared in the opposition to Massport's proposed runway at Logan Airport. It begins in the East Boston-Revere area and wends its way west and northwest to suburbia, and its potential to produce some shaking and quaking can be detected on the South Shore.

While major players in Communities Against Runway Expansion, the coalition opposing Runway 14/32, have made common cause this year with suburbanites who oppose commercial flights at Hanscom Field, other opponents are witholding their support from that alliance and, in some cases, are attacking it outright.

Opponents of Logan's expansion or commercial flights at Hanscom Field in Bedford are now worried that any perceived crack in their unity would benefit Massport.

''My problem,'' said state Representative Eugene L. O'Flaherty, a Chelsea Democrat who also represents Charlestown, and who remains wary of the alliance with Hanscom's neighbors, ''is that Massport will profit from any dissension that occurs among organizations opposed to their way of solving transportation problems.''

''The answer isn't just to pit community against community,'' asserted Neil Rasmussen of Concord, an alliance supporter and the president of Save Our Heritage, a suburban coalition opposed to the commercial flights at Hanscom. ''That's how Massport makes progress.''

''Massport is making a piecemeal attempt to solve problems with this runway proposal,'' argued Stephen Lathrop, chairman of Hull's Airport Advisory Committee and an alliance advocate. ''People who try to respond to it with piecemeal solutions fall into the same trap.''

The argument over whether airport opponents in such urban areas as Boston, Winthrop, Somerville, and Chelsea should align with suburbanites from towns such as Lincoln, Lexington, Concord, and Bedford, has been going on sporadically for three decades.

The question, simply, is: Do opponents of Logan's expansion, and critics of commercial flights at Hanscom, have more to gain or lose for their respective causes by cooperating, or by fighting each other?

The revival this month of that issue is only one of a series of developments not only involving Logan and Hanscom but also reflecting the larger issue of how people should move from place to place in New England.

Massport opponents say the agency and Governor Paul Cellucci have not looked beyond the immediate issue of airport expansion to the larger possibilities of a regional transportation plan that would include everything from new rail lines to the potential of telecommunications.

Both Massport and the Cellucci administration counter with a laundry list of actions they say they have taken to diminish airline activity at Logan and to promote it at regional airports.

Opposition to the proposed 5,000-foot, single-direction Logan runway, which Massport says is needed to reduce delays and to spread noise more fairly, is escalating on the South Shore as local officials become aware of statistics showing a dramatic increase of overflights if the runway is built.

Hull and Hingham have created committees to deal with the issue, and Cohasset may follow suit. There are also rumors that South Shore opponents are considering suing Massport, but activists have declined to comment.

As a six-member panel, created earlier this year by Federal Aviation Administration chief Jane Garvey, struggles to determine if Massport's proposed Runway 14/32 should be built, the three panel members who oppose the runway may have leveled the playing field by getting their own consultant to review Massport's revised environmental impact statements.

Garvey made that happen last month after hearing from US Representative J. Joseph Moakley, a South Boston Democrat and a key opponent of the runway. He said: ''I told Garvey it was important to have an independent person do a study.''

Frederick Salvucci - formerly the state's secretary of transportation and construction, a onetime Massport board member, and a longtime opponent of Logan expansion - has jumped back into the airport fight, both publicly and behind the scenes.

Salvucci is lobbying Massport to deal creatively with air traffic issues, and he has proposed limits on the runway, should it be approved someday by the FAA. He has met privately with Virginia Buckingham, Massport's director, but neither has commented on what happened.

On the other hand, what was made quite public at an Aug. 31 news conference by some East Boston residents was the creation of a new group, Share the Air Regionally, or STAR.

They demanded that the airplane noise and the ground traffic pollution created by the airport be shared by other New England communities. They specifically asked Garvey to approve ''without further delay'' Shuttle America's request for permission to provide commercial service from Hanscom to LaGuardia Airport in New York.

Massport supports the airline's request. Hanscom's neighbors oppose it, saying their airport is busy enough as a general aviation facility for corporate jets and private planes.

In an example of the political clout available to opponents of Hanscom expansion, the FAA last Monday cancelled Shuttle Air's scheduled Tuesday morning kickoff of its LaGuardia service. The 30-day postponement, purportedly to allow further review of the impact commercial aviation might have on nearby historic sites, followed concern expressed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy's office.

Usually, opponents of Logan expansion have demanded that Hanscom share the burden of air travel, especially because so many business executives who work in the high-tech companies along Route 128 and Route 495 have used Logan.

Time and again, Mary Berninger, an Orient Heights resident and STAR organizer, and politicians who attended the news conference cited that issue of ''fairness.''

But even some of those who attended and spoke at the news conference had some doubts about the new group. Rumors have abounded that Massport was behind STAR's organization.

By pushing what it says is the regionalization of air travel, Massport might have a strong argument to overturn a 1970s court injunction against the runway and persuade the FAA to support the project.

''Massport appears to be, sub rosa, attempting to split the widespread coalition of CARE that exists from Hull to Medford by forming a new citizens' group who can turn out one hell of a political presence,'' said Tom McNiff, a Winthrop Airport Hazards Committee member attending the news conference. ''Some activists believe high-ranking executives of Massport from East Boston are behind this.''

Berninger lauded Massport for regionalizing air travel, but State Representative Robert DeLeo, a Democrat representing Winthrop and part of Revere, said later that when he heard Berninger's speech, he said to himself: ''Wait a minute, we have to get back on what we're here about. A year ago, many of these same people were very strong in oppposing the new runway, and I didn't hear that at all.

''I wanted to make sure we were still vocal and not just say, `Massport, thank you for regionalization and for looking at Hanscom Field.'''

Emanuel ''Gus'' Serra, who served as East Boston's state representative for three decades before he became a key aide to Massport's director, has been pushing the agency to spread airline traffic to Hanscom, Worcester, Manchester, N.H., and T.F. Green, near Providence. He denied, however, that he was the force behind STAR, though he had met with STAR members at Santarpio's, a popular neighborhood pizza joint.

Among those speaking at the news conference was a Revere city councilor, Richard Penta, who also works at Massport.

Jose Juves, a Massport spokesman, said the agency had provided STAR members with information just as it has done with other groups.

If regionalization is the common thread that holds Massport and STAR together on the one hand, and also is a top issue for their critics, what, then, is the problem?

It is twofold.

First, STAR members and Massport attack the alliance between CARE and the Hanscom suburbanites as hypocritical, and some Greater Boston politicians say they worry about it. Why should opponents of Logan's expansion break bread with those who traditionally do not wish to do their share? Indeed, some Hanscom residents have wondered why they should cooperate with Logan's neighbors.

CARE and Save Our Heritage have called for a moratorium on both the Logan runway and commercial air service at Hanscom. Both sides cite strength in numbers. Both attack Massport for what they consider the agency's historic attempts to ''divide and conquer'' by pitting communities against each other.

''There's no question that such an alliance is fraught with some danger, so I understand the fears and skepticism,'' said state Representative Jay Kaufman, a Lexington Democrat, ''but unless we nourish that kind of alliance, Massport and the FAA will continue the divide-and-conquer approach. We need to accept the fact that we are all up against a very powerful industry, the aviation industry, and we need to be in this fight together.''

Marty Pepper Aisenberg, project director for Save Our Heritage, contends STAR members ''have blinders on.''

''Expanding Hanscom isn't going to help Logan,'' he said, ''and it is going to hurt the opponents of the runway because this is phony regionalization, a fig leaf for Massport so they can say, `We have our regional approach. We put airlines in the suburbs, so give us our runway.' What we need to do is contain aviation and not spread it around without limit.''

That leads to the second problem. Massport's idea of regionalization means working with other New England airports to spread the air traffic around. That includes extending a rail line to T.F. Green in Rhode Island and widening Route 3 to Manchester in New Hampshire. It means spending money to advertise other airports and to build up its Worcester facility.

Opponents push for what they say is a wider and more comprehensive study of regionalization, one that would involve everything from new railroad services to the impact of telecommunications on business travel.

''The governor had a chance to do this right two years ago,'' said Peter Welsh, an aide to Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, ''to appoint a commission to work with the other governors in New England to develop a regional approach. He's not taken any leadership role in that area. He's let it drift. We have always said Hanscom should have more traffic, but in the context of looking at the whole region. It's not rocket science. It isn't even jet science. It's just a common-sense approach.''

The argument resonates among anti-runway activists on the South Shore who are are saying that over a decade, flight patterns prompted by the new runway would increase jet flights from about 23,000 to 98,000 a year over their communities.

''You can plan on a major superhighway flying low over Hull, Hingham, and Cohasset,'' said Richard Goldhammer of Hingham.

Asked if South Shore runway opponents were planning a lawsuit, as has been rumored, Goldhammer said, ''It would be premature for me to comment on that because all the players involved aren't here to consent. A better time to ask that question would be late September.'' He declined to say why.

Eric Oddleifson, a Boston businessman who lives in Cohasset, said he was briefing local leaders ''on the catastrophe about to be visited upon us with Runway 14/32. They don't understand. We're like the frog being put into lukewarm water. The heat is slowly turned up, and it sits there, eyes glazed, and ultimately exprires and gets eaten.

''My interest is in pulling together the South Shore as a coherent force.'' Beyond that, he said, ''I am trying to create the Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance, including air, highway, rail, water transport operators, as well as politicians, pilots, everybody.''

Hull's Lathrop, a graphic artist who has taken the time to read the fine print of federal airline regulations and Massport environmental impact statements, worries that ''without some kind of formal system of capping operations, the plan is for Logan to continue to grow. That's what the airlines want, what Massport wants, what the FAA wants. The new runway is to increase capacity at Logan.''

Salvucci, the transportation secretary who worked on reductions in highway and airport expansion, expanded mass transit, and created the Big Dig, said that if the runway were inevitable, he could support it, but only with limitations on use and noise.

He said he still feels the runway is the wrong solution, ''a bad idea because it can accommodate only small planes, which are the root cause of Logan's problems.''

''There are too many planes,'' Salvucci said. ''Forty to 45 percent of the aircraft movements at Logan are small turboprops carrying less than 10 percent of the people. That's crazy. Do something to get that 42 percent or so down to a more reasonable number, probably in the 20s, so instead of 120 aircraft movements per hour, Logan would operate around 95 an hour.''

''Aviation is going to grow,'' he said, ''so the answer is a smaller number of larger aircraft. How do you convince the airlines to provide more service in fewer planes?''

Massport operators can encourage airlines to change their habits, but federal laws and regulations make it difficult for airport operators to force the airlines to do much of anything.

''Massport is only one of the villains,'' said Kaufman, the Lexington state representative. ''The role that airline industry money plays in the national political scene is frightening.''< p > [This story ran in the Weekly section of all five Greater Boston regional editions of the Boston Sunday Globe on 9/17/2000.]

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