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    • Wall NJ Airport owner says Monmouth County is trying to take his land
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    Wall NJ Airport owner says Monmouth County is trying to take his land

    Online Niel Posted on

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    WALL – The owner of Monmouth Executive Airport is warning it will be forced to suspend flight operations early Friday to accommodate a site visit by county government consultants who want to inspect its property.

    Alan Antaki, who owns New Jersey’s largest private airport, with a runway longer than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, said the Monmouth County Board of Commissioners plans to use eminent domain laws to force him to sell his property to the county government against his will.

    Monmouth County sought to purchase general aviation airport for public property for more than 55 years, making the first effort to do so in the late 1960s. However, Monmouth County Commissioner Executive Thomas A. Arnone said that while county government is again exploring the possibility in 2020s, the board has not made any final decisions.

    Recently, Antaki was informed that the county government was exercising its prerogative to obtain preliminary entry on the property by invoking New Jersey’s eminent domain statute. The law allows a government entity and its consultants limited access to private property under consideration for acquisition to conduct appraisals, surveys and other fact-finding inspections, according to a statement released through Antaki’s attorney, Thom Ammirato.

    The fully Republican county council appointed Commercial aviationa consulting firm based in Summit, to determine whether the 740-acre complex could be better managed and maintained under public ownership by Monmouth County.

    The inspection and resulting two-hour flight shutdown will take place Friday during “peak hours — between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m.,” Ammirato said.

    “Even a short airport closure will inconvenience pilots and people who use our airport, but the county is giving me no choice,” Antaki said.

    Project manager Ed Harrison and airport planner Pawel Mankowski of Merchant Aviation said the site visit did not require the airport to suspend flight operations and that their visit should have been allowed during the day when there would have been no interference in operations.

    “As the largest owner and operator of airports around the world, we have conducted dozens of airport inspections and no airport has ever had to close during an inspection,” Harrison and Mankowski said in a statement to Asbury Park Press.

    “Our visual inspection will be conducted safely and will not adversely impact operations at the Monmouth County Airport,” the statement continued. “The owner’s request that we conduct our inspection after midnight is outside of any industry standard and would be safer and more productive during daytime operations. We look forward to providing Monmouth County with a detailed review of our findings.”

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    “Even a short airport closure will inconvenience pilots and people who use our airport, but the county is giving me no choice,” Antaki insisted.

    Antaki was offended by the first site visit in May. He explained that “a bus full of county officials,” which included Monmouth County Sheriff Arnone, Shaun Golden (county Republican Party chairman) and a team of public relations staff. Some behaved arrogantly as they surveyed the grounds as if the airport was already theirs, Antaki said.

    That visit convinced him that the county had privately established a plan to purchase the airport, whether it was willing to sell or not.

    Arnone said he had “heard disturbing reports from a variety of sources about the state of the airport and its support facilities” and after the visit “came away with my own serious concerns, both about the airport’s safety and viability his finances”.

    Kevin Israel, a public relations and crisis management consultant for Kessler PR Group in Ocean Township, which handles media inquiries about the airport on behalf of the county government, said there were no written complaints for a reporter to review because “reports are anecdotal.” However, Israel pointed to a recent letter to the editor published in Coast Star from former state Rep. Ned Thomson, R-Monmouth, in which he himself expressed concern about the airport.

    “Commissioner Arnone recently enlisted former MP Ned Thomson in his crusade to take on the airport, and Thomson published a letter in a local paper questioning Mr. Antaki’s efforts to pay the EPA debt for a cleanup that had long before Antaki bought the airport,” Ammirato. he wrote in an email to the Press.

    This issue dates back to 2010, when the Environmental Protection Agency and Wall Herald Corporation (the parent company of the airport, which Antaki acquired in 2013), reached an agreement in US District Court to spend approximately $20 million dollars to clean up a Superfund site at the airport that was to be paid for from the proceeds of its sale.

    The agreement has been modified several times since Antaki took ownership of the airport and has struggled to keep up with the monthly payments, which at one point were costing him $100,000 a month, according to federal court records.

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    Antaki has vowed to litigate — for years, if necessary — any attempt by the county government to use eminent domain to buy its airport.

    The relationship between the county and Antaki became so acrimonious that Antaki filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Golden and the Monmouth County Parks system in late summer, claiming his First Amendment rights were violated.

    Antaki said his employees were ordered to leave the county fair in Freehold in July, where they were distributing flyers about the issue across the airport.

    Ammirato said the three workers were removed by county park rangers and sheriff’s officers, who escorted them to an area outside the fairgrounds entrance and made them sit next to several sheriff’s vehicles.

    A few minutes later, one of the guards hastily painted a square box on the ground where the workers were instructed to sit inside. They were told not to speak or approach any fair; and that flyers could only be handed out to people who asked for them, he said.

    County officials said no one is allowed to distribute materials to the public at the fair unless they are part of an authorized display.

    Contact Asbury Park Press reporter Erik Larsen at [email protected].

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