Few Nassau voices on Port Authority’s plane noise committees

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Next month, after a five-month hiatus from airplane noise, Runway 4L-22R at John F. Kennedy International Airport will reopen after undergoing an expansion to accommodate more and bigger planes — and, highly likely, bring more airplane noise to the area.

Yet despite the noise’s impact on many parts of Nassau County, there’s still a glaring lack of Nassau representation on the round table and coordinating committees created by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to address community concerns about the noise from Kennedy and LaGuardia airports.

The committees were part of a multi-faceted directive issued last year by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to the Port Authority to address plane noise. “Airport noise is, rightly, an important concern for residents of Queens, the Bronx and Nassau County,” Cuomo stated in a March 2014 press release, “and that is why I am directing the Port Authority to open a full and thorough dialogue with the impacted communities.”

There are only four representatives of Nassau communities, however, on the 64-member round table, which has not met since April, and has not had any contact with the affected communities since that meeting.

The same holds true for the four-member Coordinating Committee, which used to have one Nassau County representative from the Town of Hempstead — Kendall Lampkin — but Lampkin resigned to join a Technical Advisory Committee, also created by the Port Authority. Now the Coordinating Committee has no Nassau representation.

“There was nothing put into place to replace a member who resigned in the middle of the process,” said Barbara Brown, a co-chair of the Coordinating Committee and the chairwoman of the Eastern Queens Alliance, a coalition of civic associations. Brown said that the Coordinating Committee has been busy all summer writing bylaws, which will dictate how it will operate.

Other sources, however, told the Herald that Janet Mceneaney, the Coordinating Committee’s other co-chair, is training for an administrative court judgeship in Washington, and there is conjecture that she has had little time this summer to devote to the committee.

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