To the Editor,

In the 1/12/17 issue of the East Hampton Star, David Gruber and the East Hampton Airport Planning Committee, a group of airport neighboring property owners, announced a solution to their long term suffering inflicted by the outrageous activities of the East Hampton Airport. The plan is in response to what the Committee has continually deemed an intolerable and dangerous affront to mind and body, an intentional all-out attack on the environmental habitat, an Armageddon to the character of the town, a destroyer of property value, a tool of the rich and a moral insult at a level of physical and mental psychological outrage that no one should be made to suffer.

What is the Committee’s solution to all of this emotional grief and hardship? What is the answer to their proclamations regarding the airport’s unfair, unhealthy, and immorally disgraceful assault on a segment of Town’s property owners who they represent, while continually and constantly reminding us of our Town wide moral obligation of supporting the righteousness of their property interests? To all this, the East Hampton Airport Planning Committee has a breathtakingly simple effective solution. They want the town to buy the Montauk Airport. That’s it….. Problem solved….. Case closed. The Committee’s reasoning is impeccable: Why should we suffer all of the above when we can pass it off on Montauk.

In terms of airport vicinity-property owner-logic, it is indeed an extremely awesome proposal. Buy the Montauk Airport and in a flash neighboring East Hampton Airport property owner’s woes, problems and miseries become Montauk’s woes, problems and miseries. And if that were not enough, the Committee has graciously undertaken to solve any worrisome issues that may arise over funding of the above plan. Easy… use the East Hampton Community Preservation Fund money…. Additional comment unrequired.

Even disregarding the immorality, selfishness, and all out hypocrisy of such a scheme, there exist countless physical and real world reasons why Montauk Airport would be a nightmare in terms of impracticability, safety, management, and physical size. It also would be a total unmitigated disaster to the economic, civic, and private property ownership of The Montauk Hamlet which represents a real factual economic base, population center, and voting bloc far larger than any unproven, undocumented group which the East Hampton Airport Planning Committee claims to represent. However, if we ignore the standards of group responsibility to one’s own problems, civic good-citizenship, and the ethics of responsible planning, the East Hampton Airport Planning Committee’s idea is indeed an effective solution, as indicative in the above proposal, to what has always been their primary goal: “anywhere, but not in my backyard.”

Citizens of Montauk, beware.

Tom Bogdan

Montauk United