Looney To Tweed: Cool Your Jets

Commercial air service at Tweed-New Haven Airport is growing nearly as fast as an SST — too fast, in the opinion of one influential neighbor.

That neighbor is Fort Hale Road resident Martin Looney. Who happens to run the State Senate.

Like other longtime New Haveners, Looney has watched the decades-old debate about whether to bring one or two commercial flights to Tweed suddenly pivot at warp speed to connections to dozens of cities.

News of the latest expansion came Tuesday: A second airline, Breeze, is joining Avelo in bringing commercial flights to Tweed. Between them they will now fly jets to 37 different cities from Tweed — compared to between zero and one city at time, in the years before Avelo set up shop there in November 2021.

Avelo ramped up faster than expected due to a decision to focus first on leisure travel rather than the holy grail of business travel that Tweed advocates had pursued in the past.

“They have developed a lot more quickly than anyone thought they would,” Democratic State Sen. Looney, who serves as State Senate pro tem, said during a conversation on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program Tuesday after the announcement of the latest Tweed service expansion.

He didn’t bring out the bubbly to toast the news.

The reason: All those flights are landing on the short runways of the residential New Haven side of the town line-straddling airport, jamming the small outdated terminal and adjacent roads with more people and cars than intended.

The Avelo plan has always been to switch to a longer runway and a new terminal on the commercial East Haven side of the airport by now. But anti-airport animus in that town led the mayor to renege on his original support for the idea, which is now mired in political delays. So the planes keep coming and coming while the infrastructure to support them remains stuck in neutral.

“The area around it is not conducive to having that much travel coming in,” Looney said of Morris Cove.

So he was pleased at first, he said, when Avelo announced last month that it is branching out to Windsor Locks’ Bradley Airport for some of its newly added flights.

“I thought that was going to start relieving some of the pressure, but it doesn’t look like it now,” Looney said. ​“They have room to grow at Bradley, and they’ve already got some flights at Bradley. So I would encourage them to expand at Bradley.” He also called for Tweed to pay for more of the window replacements, air-conditioning units and noise-reduction improvements it has offered to Morris Cove homeowners.

In the meantime, he said he and legislative colleagues are trying to help with the negotiations on the East Haven terminal plan.

“I think East Haven can virtually get whatever they ask for” in negotiations with the state and the airport, Looney suggested. Assuming any package of financial help (such as paying for a new police station) will mollify the politically influential East Haven opposition. One idea he said he’ll support: Having the state reimburse the town for any lost tax revenue through the creation of a new small-business enterprise development zone.

If that were to happen, would Looney then support the continued new torrid growth of commercial air service at Tweed?

“If the East Haven terminal is built, I think it’s a viable airport,” Looney responded. ​“I still think that it’s probably reached a level that I wouldn’t want to see it get much bigger than it is now, even if it is operating out of East Haven.”

That was one of many issues Looney promised to tackle if elected this November to an 18th two-year term in the State Senate. (He was first elected to the legislature, as a representative, in 1980.) Republican Steve Orosco is challenging Looney this year, as he did in 2022.

In the ​“Dateline” interview, Looney said he’ll work next session on easing the ​“volatility cap” contained in the 2018 bipartisan ​“fiscal guardrails” in order to fill funding gaps for early childhood education and higher education, among other priorities; to continue pursuing a marginal ​“mansion tax”; to push for a child tax credit; and to try again to make striking workers eligible for unemployment compensation after two weeks on the picket line. In addition to his own reelection, he’s helping Democrats try to grow their 24-seat supermajority in the 36-member Senate; he said three Republican-controlled seats are particularly vulnerable in districts decided by a close margin in 2022.

Click on the video below to watch the full conversation with State Sen. Martin Looney on WNHH FM’s​“Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of Dateline New Haven.