Delayed environmental filing looms over Hanscom expansion

Select Board Chair Wendy Rovelli says “it will be a crisis” when developers behind a proposed Hanscom Field hangar expansion project drop a long-awaited environmental report. 

When exactly that report will arrive remains an open question, and newly released emails show developers navigating months of hurdles — including endangered vegetation on the site.

The timeline “keeps slipping,” said Rovelli, Acton’s representative on the Hanscom Area Towns Committee. 

Project plans have called for new fuel storage and 17 private hangars at Hanscom. 

Backers say the airfield needs new hangars to meet demand. Activists and town officials alike fear extra noise and pollution. Locals will have a chance to respond to the environmental report during a public comment period.

Expansion opponents won an incremental victory in June 2024 when state Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rebecca Tepper found the developers’ initial draft environmental impact report inadequate.

Developers from North Airfield Ventures LLC and Runway Realty Ventures LLC went back to work on a supplemental filing, which they’ll have to submit to advance the project. 

Officials at Hanscom’s quasi-public operator, Massport, have backed the hangar project. The Acton Bridge and CommonWealth Beacon requested emails between Massport and the development team. The agency’s response covers communications between July 2024 and February of this year.

Rick Muse, the developers’ director of operations, said in one message that the team planned to submit the new environmental report in October 2025. The date slid to a more general goal of filing “towards the end” of 2025, before falling further into the first quarter of 2026.

As of February, developers expected to file “around June,” but on Tuesday Muse said that “we will most likely shift the June date.” He said he didn’t have a new target.

Muse had told The Bridge and CommonWealth Beacon in late April that the team was continuing to work on responses to regulators’ comments.

“This was an extensive document,” he wrote in an email, and that’s “the main reason” the timeline keeps shifting. Developers have also been looking to line up hangar tenants, which they’ll need in order to actually make money.

“We need to make sure that our responses are accurately reflecting what their potential operations programs would be,” Muse said.

A 3-foot hurdle 

Muse assured state and federal officials in a November 2024 email that “the proponents of the development are all in.”

Records show some headwinds in the following months. 

Experts found the midland sedge, a state-recognized rare plant, within the project area. 

The original report acknowledged the plant. In July 2025, though, a biologist working with the team warned that the state might want a formal survey to assess the risk that construction would pose. 

Emails also mention last fall’s federal government shutdown. Project staffers had several calls with officials canceled during that disruption and the holiday season, Muse wrote in early December. 

‘Heartbreaking’

State Sen. Michael Barrett, whose district includes Hanscom, said the hangar proposal and recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement flights are a “heartbreaking” stain on an otherwise innocuous regional hub. 

State Rep. Simon Cataldo, whose district includes part of Acton, praised advocates for helping shine a light on issues with the initial environmental report.

“There’s another world in which this thing has glided through,” he said.

Signs campaigning to “stop private jet expansion” remain in front yards around town. 

Rovelli spoke to a reporter before her Select Board colleagues elected her as chair on May 18.

On expansion, she said, “There’s going to be a constituency that’s going to be far against anything that they’re doing.”

As for the actual plans, she said, “We have to see what they do.”

This story was reported in a collaboration between The Acton Bridge and CommonWealth Beacon.