SEACOASTONLINE: May 4, 2022
Commentary: Pease Development Authority's air cargo misinformation campaign in full swing
Huddy Grandy, Newington Resident
Guest Columnist
On Monday, April 18, 2022, Paul Brean, executive director of the Pease Development Authority, stood in front of the Portsmouth City Council and mystified the crowd with his well-worn smoke and mirrors approach to concerns over major air cargo development at Pease Tradeport. His presentation was carefully practiced. In its April 20, 2022 article entitled “Pease Leader: ‘Airfield limitations’ to affect cargo facility size. Towns raise concerns,” Seacoastonline reported on many of Mr. Brean’s workshopped, focus-grouped “responses” to the City Council. But readers deserve the cold, hard facts behind his responses.
First, during his presentation Mr. Brean predicted that “it is likely that any proposal that does come forward will be very different than the square footage involved in the option agreement. We know that due diligence is already calling for a much smaller footprint if anything comes before us.” The discerning listener understands that it could equally well go the other way: due diligence may, once concluded, call for an even larger footprint. Why? Because that is what developers, venture capitalists and multi-national end users like Amazon or FedEx want: the maximum build-out, for maximized yield on investment.
Brean then brushed aside the public’s concern that an air cargo facility might bring jumbo jets flying day and night over the Seacoast. Of cargo flights, he offered disingenuously: “they come in propeller planes, they come in jumbo jets, they come in once a week or they come in multiple times a day.” Mr. Brean, it doesn’t matter if air cargo is transported by blimp. We need to know what the probable air cargo schedules and carriers will be at Pease.
His presentation continued in a similar manner, with vague references to “airfield limitations,” specifically, limited places to park planes. He even had the audacity to claim that Pease has “limitations on our bulk fuel.” Just last year, however, the PDA permitted Million Air to locate a brand-new fuel farm at Pease. There is no demand for a second fuel farm at Pease. In fact, prior fuel farm closures have shown that Pease can only sustain a single fuel farm under current conditions. Now, Million Air is requesting a waiver from DES to fill wetlands for an access road to their proposed fuel farm, located shoulder to shoulder with the proposed massive air cargo facility. The PDA would like the public to assume this is simply a coincidence. Hardly.
Though there are currently some limitations at Pease, the whole purpose of PROCON/Kane’s exclusive option contracts, available here and here, is to determine exactly how to eliminate the airfield limitations that currently exist at Pease in order to build out a massive 725,000 square foot facility.
Developers, their venture capitalist backers, and end users have been waiting for the PDA to invite air cargo development at Pease. Pease is a highly attractive site for an air cargo center because of its extremely long runway (uniquely suited to handle some of the largest military and commercial aircraft in the world, such as the immense C-5 Galaxy or Boeing 777-ER), its ideal geographic location, its low aircraft fees, and other reasons. Once a deal is done, these parties will of course seek to maximize build-out of the facility, whether up front or in stages over time, in order to maximize return on investment for the 49 years they will hold a land lease at Pease. Demand for air cargo is skyrocketing, and Paul Brean has been preparing to capitalize on it for years.