Several members of Winthrop’s Town Council are seeking ways of pushing Massport toward greater reparations tied to pollution and noise from Logan Airport, and hoping a new tax agreement might ease persistent political and scientific obstacles to a better relationship.

Town Council members wrestled with the strategy while agreeing last week, on a 6-3 vote, to extend and expand their decades-old tax compensation agreement with the Massachusetts Port Authority, Logan’s owner and operator.

The tax agreement – known as a Pilot, meaning Payment in Lieu of Taxes – is a common arrangement in which a tax-exempt entity compensates a local government for the cost of municipal services it uses.

Speaker effect

In Massport’s case, Logan doesn’t use Winthrop town services, and the annual Pilot payment is more officially discussed as reimbursement for the usage of 192 acres of airport land built on top of ocean that was designated as Winthrop property in old maritime boundaries. Yet Logan does impose substantial noise and pollution on Winthrop, and while Massport takes some steps to address it, the agency officially pays the town little if anything for producing that more incontrovertible cost of living in Winthrop.

It’s an omission that Winthrop has tried to address in the past, most notably with the 2019 agreement in which MassPort – persuaded by the then-speaker of the state House of Representatives, Robert DeLeo of Winthrop – paid $2.5 million over five years to create a foundation for aiding local nonprofits in town.

But there’s little official justification for that kind of benevolence. US airports typically don’t pay nearby communities for the harms they cause them, as federal rules bar such mitigation for nearly any reason except for the effect of parking facilities. Mr DeLeo, with the considerable power of the speakership, helped win the $2.5 million community benefit fund by persuading Massport that his hometown – despite not being near Logan’s parking garages – was technically entitled to receive compensation that could be attributed to them.

Mr DeLeo then left office in 2020. That departure meant Winthrop — with its political power substantially weakened – needed new ways of gaining protections and compensation related to airport operations. Opinions on that way forward still vary, as Town Council members showed in their consideration of the Pilot agreement.

Cooperative approach

“We should be compensated for all of the pollution generated by Massport,” one Town Council member, Patrick Costigan, told his colleagues as they assessed the Pilot renewal between Massport and Winthrop. Mr Costigan put emphasis on the problem of jets burning fuel and shedding rubber from their tires. “These are all carcinogens to the residents of Winthrop,” he said, asserting that Winthrop’s cancer rates exceed national averages.

Winthrop’s town manager, Tony Marino, proposed a cooperative approach. He suggested the importance of starting a new pursuit of justice from Massport by approving the Pilot agreement, which will increase Massport’s annual tax-compensation payment to Winthrop from $2.1 million to $3 million in its first year. Mr Marino repeatedly told the Town Council that Pilot payments cannot legally be calculated as mitigation for the effects of airport operations, and he called MassPort’s approach and payment offer strong on many other measures.

“They’ve been more than fair in working with us,” Mr Marino said of Massport.

The current Pilot contract, which ran for 20 years starting in 2005, called for $900,000 annual payments from Massport to Winthrop. Even before the deal expired, however, Massport agreed in 2018 – when Mr DeLeo still served as speaker – to a new payment schedule that increased the annual benefit to $1.2 million in 2019, and to $2 million by last year. During the just-completed renewal negotiations, the sides accepted a one-year extension, giving Winthrop its $2.1 million payment for the 2026 fiscal year, which ends this month.

Pilot tradeoffs

The new agreement approved by the Town Council runs 15 years, starting at $3 million annually, rising by 1 percent for each of the first 10 years, and by 1.5 percent for the remaining five years, reaching $3.5 million in 2041. Also in the final five years, if inflation exceeds 5 percent, the payment will increase by 2.5 percent annually instead of the 1.5 percent level.

Massport owns Logan and two other state airports plus maritime properties, and has annual operating revenues exceeding $1.2 billion.

Mr Costigan joined Town Council members Suzanne Swope and Joseph Romano in voting against the Pilot agreement, citing issues that included their dissatisfaction with the amount of money paid by Massport and the limited amount of time for council members to review the terms before the new agreement takes effect at the end of this month.

Mr Marino led the town’s negotiations on the matter and said he agreed that the talks had to be limited and that the annual percentage increases were small. But Massport’s chief alternative offer, for a higher annual increase, would have started from a lower first-year rate and would have clearly produced less money overall for the town, he said.

Mr Marino also acknowledged the concern among several Town Council members that a 15-year contract might be too long, given that economic conditions can change quickly. But he said the risks of time run either direction, that Massport wouldn’t offer Winthrop the same annual increases on a shorter-term agreement, that Winthrop has no legal rights to receive any particular payment level, that Winthrop’s rate is far higher on a per-acre basis than the amount Boston gets in its Pilot agreement for its land at Logan, and that Massport already showed a willingness to renegotiate rates in the middle of an agreement.

Pollution tracking

While the Town Council largely accepted the Pilot agreement, most council members argued for a far more aggressive effort by Winthrop to measure the noise and air pollution coming from Logan – and to then somehow push Massport to reduce that harm and compensate Winthrop for it. For that, several council members talked of significantly expanding and improving the network of monitors that measure Logan’s noise and air pollution.

Massport has about 30 monitors stationed in surrounding communities for measuring noise levels, and their accuracy is generally considered strong, said Aaron Toffler, the executive director of the Massport Community Advisory Committee, the state-chartered agency that represents communities affected by Massport operations. That’s because every plane gives off distinctive noise characteristics that can be tracked to flights known to be in the area, Mr Toffler said. And, the results show, the noise from Logan in parts of Winthrop is often severe and not abated by Massport to levels otherwise allowable in town.

But air pollution, increasingly recognized for its enormous harm and deadliness, is considerably more disparate and tracking its origin is correspondingly more difficult. And the Massport Community Advisory Committee has deployed only three air pollution monitors – two in East Boston and one at Point Shirley in Winthrop. Several members of the Winthrop Town Council demanded the installation of more such monitors, with the town choosing their locations and keeping control over their readings, citing their suspicions over Massport’s handling and truthfulness with them.

The monitors cost about $15,000 apiece, plus data tracking costs, and multiple council members suggested using some of the Pilot money to pay for them. “I’d much rather be collecting the information ourselves, and be able to make the case for mitigation, than wait for them to tell us what the information means,” said the Town Council president, Jim Letterie.

Good rapport

Yet Mr Toffler and other experts acknowledged that air pollution monitors have no ability to distinguish between pollution coming from planes versus other sources including Winthrop’s own car traffic. And either way, Massport and Logan – like all other US airports – operate under federal rules that limit or forbid paying communities for the noise and pollution they cause. And Winthrop adheres to a car-centric community design that is known to discourage public travel modes, which have been shown to significantly reduce air traffic.

Mr Marino endorsed the idea of using some of the Pilot money to better document the ways that Logan operations harm Winthrop, and use the positive relations arising from the Pilot negotiation process to look for ways that Massport can be persuaded to help Winthrop manage those effects. “Keep that relationship going, and start building it, so we can get future mitigation,” he said.

Council member Kim Dimes backed that strategy. The process of increasing the Pilot payment is helpful for Winthrop’s finances and for the town’s relations with state officials, Ms Dimes said. “We’re building some good rapport with Massport,” she said.

Mr Letterie, a regular critic of the state’s role in housing policy, also admitted praise for Massport as an agency that regularly helps Winthrop at moments of need. “We don’t talk much about the day-to-day things they’ve helped us with in other areas,” he said.