Long Island MacArthur Airport has spent thirty years being described as underused, which is a polite way of saying that a metropolitan area of nearly three million people sends most of its air traffic somewhere else. This month the Town of Islip took the largest concrete step toward changing that in a generation, and then its own board declined to pay for the next one.

Who was chosen

Islip named Fly Long Island, operating as Fly LI Partners, its preferred proposer for a new terminal at MacArthur. It is a joint venture of RXR, the Uniondale-based real estate firm, and Avports, an airport operator.

Preferred proposer is the right term to hold onto. The selection has been recommended to the Town Board for action, and the board is still completing due diligence before any final vote. Nothing is signed.

What the project is for

The town's own materials for the terminal project are unusually direct about the logic, and the logic has almost nothing to do with the building.

It is about the train. The Ronkonkoma station of the Long Island Rail Road is adjacent to the airfield, and the point of a new terminal is to connect the two so that a passenger can arrive by rail and walk to a gate. Islip is evaluating two configurations, one on the south side of the airfield and one on the north, each with a different approach to the rail link.

What that would buy, in the town's framing: one-seat rail access to Manhattan in under an hour, with trains to Penn Station and Grand Central at 30-minute headways. Room for considerable gate growth. A low cost per enplaned passenger, which is the metric airlines actually decide on. And a shot at traffic that currently drives past MacArthur to airports that have run out of room.

The town also makes a point that will matter at every hearing to come: the plan requires no new property acquisition and no disturbance of new land. Everything happens inside the existing airport footprint.

The project is led on the town side by executive project lead Shelley LaRose, with Airport Commissioner Robert Schneider and Supervisor Angie Carpenter. The financing approach is private investment rather than a municipal bond issue, which is the entire reason a developer is being selected at all.

The $250,000

Days after the selection, the Town Board voted 3-2 to withhold $250,000 that had been earmarked for outside legal counsel, project management, financial consultation and airport planning on the terminal project.

The stated reason was not the developer. It was the land next door.

Suffolk County has its own request for proposals out for 48 acres of county-owned land between the airport and the train station, issued July 3, with responses due at the end of September. Two overlapping procurements are running on adjacent parcels in the same corridor, one by a town and one by a county, and the majority on the Islip board would rather see what the county's process produces before spending more on consultants for its own.

Council Member John Lorenzo put it as plainly as anyone: the town wants $250,000 more and does not yet know what the county proposal will deliver. He urged the board to pump the brakes.

Whether that is caution or delay

It can be read both ways, and both readings are defensible.

The case for waiting is that the corridor only works as one thing. A terminal connected to a train station, surrounded by 48 acres of whatever the county picks, is a district. A terminal connected to a train station surrounded by 48 acres of something incompatible is a nicer airport with a walkway. Islip has no vote in the county's selection and no obligation to fund consultants who will be planning around an unknown.

The case against is that MacArthur has been almost-expanded before. There is $150 million of state money committed to the rail connection and $50 million of proposed county money for surrounding infrastructure, both of which have their own timelines and neither of which waits indefinitely for a town to finish deliberating. Momentum on a project of this kind is a real asset and it is not renewable.

What has to happen next

Three things, in sequence. The county opens its responses at the end of September. Islip finishes due diligence on Fly LI Partners. And the Town Board takes a final vote on the developer selection.

Until that third one, the honest status of a new terminal at MacArthur is that a town has named its preferred partner and has not yet agreed to pay the lawyers who would write the deal.