Activists keep heat on Hanscom with new faith-based resolutions against expansion 

On a sunny Sunday after worship at First Parish in Lexington, members of the church’s climate action team gather for coffee hour in the parish hall. Each chatty congregation member holds a ceramic mug with coffee or tea — no single-use plastic here.

Today, the climate action team talks about Hanscom Airfield and its plans for expansion.

Proposed by North Airfield Ventures LLC and Runway Realty Ventures LLC, the expansion at Hanscom would add 17 new hangars for the exclusive use of private jets and would take up nearly 500,000 square feet of space.

Opponents of the expansion believe it would recklessly increase carbon emissions, putting Hanscom’s neighbors at risk and jeopardizing statewide climate gains. Private jets emit at least 10 times more pollutants per passenger than commercial planes, critics note. They also say it would only serve a small population of the region’s wealthy elite and not the general public.

North Airfield Ventures LLC and Runway Realty Ventures LLC did not respond to LexObserver’s request for comment.

“We don’t want them anywhere,” said Mark Fortin, a member of the First Parish congregation as well as its climate action team. “If you read the signs and the slogans, it’s not about, ‘Oh, we don’t want it in our backyard.’ We don’t think people should use private jets.”

The climate action team has adopted a range of initiatives in the eight-ish years since its inception, pushing for a town-wide ban on single-use plastic bottles, advocating for electric school buses and getting rid of gas-powered leaf blowers. 

Tom Wanderer, one of a dozen leaders on the 40-person climate action team, spearheaded the effort to pass a resolution against private jet expansion at Hanscom, which the board signed earlier this month. He sees no conflict between the role of the church and the team’s activism.

“I don’t think anybody in our church is flying in private jets, so there’s no objection there,” Wanderer said. “We as a church agree that the expansion is bad for human life and we want it not to go forward.”

The resolution urges Governor Maura Healey to stop private jet expansion at Hanscom and calls on other Unitarian Universalist congregations to do the same.

“We recognize that we have a moral imperative to act for a just and equitable transition for a livable climate and that expanding hangars anywhere for private jets is immoral and unconscionable,” the resolution reads. 

First Parish Lexington is the second church to sign such a resolution, following the Unitarian Universalist First Parish Bedford. Corinne Doud, a member of First Parish Bedford’s environmental justice committee, said environmental justice aligns with Unitarian Universalist values.

“Climate justice is a big thing in the UU world because we seek justice and we declare that every person has the right to flourish with inherent dignity and worthiness,” Doud said. “It is the ultimate environmental injustice to allow a small number of the wealthy to pollute our world disproportionately.”

Faith-based initiatives are one of several ways activists against private jet expansion at Hanscom are maintaining momentum while waiting for the developers to file an updated report on the project’s potential environmental impacts.

Rebecca Tepper, the state’s secretary of the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, tossed out the developers’ initial Draft Environmental Impact Report in June. The report did “not adequately and properly comply” with the state’s environmental regulations, Tepper wrote.

Tepper requested that the project developers create a supplemental environmental impact report that assesses the proposed expansion’s greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint. She questioned several parts of the initial report, including the estimated demand for flights out of Hanscom and the alleged need for increased hangar space.

Proponents of the expansion say it meets a need for more hangars at Hanscom and won’t necessarily lead to more private jet traffic.

Kati Winchell, coordinator of the statewide coalition to Stop Private Jet Expansion at Hanscom or Anywhere, called Tepper’s rejection “a huge interim win.”

For Winchell and other advocates, the proposed expansion at Hanscom threatens prior climate progress. If the expansion is approved, private jet emissions from Hanscom would cancel out more than half of the climate gains achieved by solar power across Massachusetts, Winchell said.

“That’s a remarkable thing, to have worked so hard with your town and city on switching from gas to clean energy in so many different ways and then having this one facility, in one fell swoop, undercut those efforts of many years,” she said.

Despite these concerns, many activists feel hopeful about a sweeping new climate bill passed last week by the state legislature and sent to Healey. 

The bill includes a change — the first since 1956 — in the Massport charter, which will require all Massport sites including Hanscom and Boston Logan International Airport to consider and potentially make reparations for their carbon emissions and other environmental impacts.

For Margaret Coppe, a Lexington resident and opponent to the proposed expansion at Hanscom, the change in Massport’s charter is important progress. But the fight is not over — and may never be, as long as the proponents of expansion have deep pockets.

“I think these struggles with airports will go on for a long time,” Coppe said. “It is definitely related to wealth. We’re saying, ‘Why does a wealthy person get to destroy the environment more than an average person?’”

Many members of First Parish Lexington’s climate action team share that sentiment. Team member Lynnell Stern said the potential destruction caused by private jet expansion at Hanscom would be devastating, and it puts the state’s climate activism into perspective.

“I think it’s so crazy that, in some sense, we worry about little things, and yet this is such a big thing,” Stern said. “This is really helping to destroy the climate.”

Moving forward, the climate action team will continue its advocacy against expansion, from passing out bright yellow yard signs to educating their congregation. With more folks joining the cause, the team feels hopeful that the expansion will be thwarted, member Brenda Prusak said.

“If we can delay things,” she said, “if we keep making it so difficult — that’s where my hope rests.”