Add Your Voice to The New HVN

Dear Mayor Elicker and Mayor Carfora,

As business owners and community leaders across New Haven and East Haven, we are writing to express our strong and unified support for the expansion of Tweed-New Haven Airport. This project is a generational opportunity, and its success is critical to the long-term health and resiliency of our region. Tweed’s growth is a success story. Since November 2021, the airport has served more than 4 million passengers across +30 destinations. It has become a source of regional pride and a
powerful, economic engine for local businesses like ours. Increased passenger activity and national connectivity have already strengthened our hospitality, retail, dining, arts, and professional service sectors, and catalyzed hundreds of new job opportunities directly and indirectly across our region.

We commend the leadership you have both demonstrated to lay this foundation, and weunderstand that as mayors, you must place the needs of your respective communities at the forefront. Yet the airport is at a critical juncture, and prolonged uncertainty could not just stall current momentum, but allow the project to fail permanently.

We urge you to find compromise and move this project forward. The benefits of the expansion are clear. Conversely, allowing the project to fail will worsen existing traffic challenges, forfeit opportunities for meaningful sound-mitigation improvements, and deny our region the private and state funding it needs to remain competitive. New Haven and East Haven now have an opportunity to secure a future of shared prosperity.

We respectfully ask that the needs of the local business community, and the infrastructure we need to thrive, remain top of mind as you advance this project.

We stand ready to support your leadership in delivering a result that benefits our workers, families, and residents.