Greed over Netflix studio is behind county’s bid to take over private airport: owner
The owner of a Monmouth County airport is accusing state and local officials of trying to seize his 746-acre property to cash in on a massive film production studio Netflix aims to develop a few miles away.
Alan Antaki said he has fended off a series of would-be buyers since he bought the Monmouth Executive Airport in 2013, and he balked again when county officials first signaled their intention to pursue the Wall Township property through eminent domain in 2023.
“There’s never been a shortage of people interested in buying the airport, because we brought it out of the doldrums. We saved it,” Antaki said. “But I’m not selling.”
County officials, though, have plowed ahead anyway, hiring consultants to assess the property and enlisting a crisis management firm to handle the resulting bad press.
“It certainly is an interesting coincidence that all of a sudden, right after Netflix commits to spend a billion dollars in New Jersey, the commissioners have an interest in taking over this regional airport that they never had an interest in taking over before,” said Matthew Dolan, Antaki’s attorney.
The former Fort Monmouth site is slated to become studio for streaming giant Netflix. (Photo by Hal Brown for New Jersey Monitor)
Once completed, Netflix’s studio at Fort Monmouth, an old Army installation that shuttered in 2011 about a dozen miles north of the airport, will be its second largest. State officials last month approved giving Netflix up to $387 million in tax breaks to develop more than a million square feet of studio space on 292 acres, with Gov. Phil Murphy heralding the project as key to making New Jersey “a national leader in film and television production.”
The streaming giant’s only other such film hub — a studio that sprawls across more than 100 acres in New Mexico with expansion plans that will have a 300-acre footprint — has created thousands of jobs and brought almost $900 million in investment to the state since it opened in 2018, Netflix officials have said.
New Jersey officials expect similar results here when Netflix, which first submitted a bid to buy Fort Monmouth in 2021, opens its studio here, which is now on track for 2028.
“This project will prove to have a significant impact on our local economy by helping to create jobs, support small businesses, and revitalize communities,” Sen. Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth) said in a statement last month.
A county spokeswoman did not respond to the New Jersey Monitor’s request for comment. Thomas A. Arnone, the Republican director of the county commissioners who is also a board member at the Fort Monmouth Economic Revitalization Authority, also declined to talk but sent an emailed statement through the crisis management firm.
In the statement, he denied that county officials want to take the airport and cited unspecified security concerns.
“Since the beginning of this process, my fellow Monmouth County Commissioners and I have made clear that our sole intention is to examine the conditions of Monmouth Executive Airport for all who utilize, live near, and work for it. We were made aware of concerns and it was our responsibility as stewards of this county to pursue this review,” the statement reads. “In November, we commissioned Merchant Aviation’s world-renowned experts to study the existing conditions of Monmouth Executive Airport. Once completed, their findings will be made public.”
Arnone declined to answer further questions, including what their security concerns are and if officials reported them to agencies tasked with ensuring transportation safety.
Antaki doesn’t buy it, anyway.
The airport has no record of safety problems, and the state Department of Transportation consequently relicensed the airport in November, he said. As a privately owned airport that has never received federal funding from the Federal Aviation Administration, it’s not obligated to meet FAA standards, an FAA spokeswoman told the New Jersey Monitor.
Arnone has also previously publicly admitted he wants the county to own the airport. In his 2024 state of the county address last March, he said not having a county-run airport was “a little pet peeve of mine.”
“For years, I’ve had a thought, along with my commissioners, that we have an airport here in Monmouth County, and we decided, as a unified board, to engage in the possibility of Monmouth County owning that airport. This is a viable resource that should never leave the county and be somewhat of a benefit to the county,” he said.
Antaki first learned the county was eyeballing his airport in November 2023. That’s when attorneys hired by the township sent him a letter notifying him of officials’ plans to inspect his property under the authority of the state’s eminent domain law, which allows government officials to survey, appraise, and visit property they intend to condemn.
Antaki said he was “blindsided.”
“Eminent domain is to widen the road or highway or what have you. Here, they just want to run the business that I’m running. This is insane,” Antaki said.
The letter cited a resolution commissioners had approved on Nov. 9, 2023, to “explore possible alternatives to preserve the airport,” which they called “an economic driver within Monmouth County since its creation over 50 years ago.” The resolution said nothing about security concerns but also cited the eminent domain statute.
“Two days after Election Day, the county, out of the blue, decided that the airport needs to be taken because they’re concerned about preserving it. I have no idea what the hell that means,” Antaki said.
The airport does not need preservation, he added, because he has worked to make it a thriving family business and remains committed to running it as an airport.
Since he bought the site, he has paid off $2.8 million in delinquent taxes, invested millions in improvements including new instrument approaches to make landings and takeoffs safer, remediated a decades-old environmental problem, and satisfied related debts to state and federal environmental authorities, he said. He also has tripled the airport’s business, he added.
The Monmouth Executive Airport in Wall Township is at the center of a fight between the airport’s owner and Monmouth County officials. (Photo by Hal Brown for New Jersey Monitor)
Political meddling
Such progress has come even as local officials have worked to “undermine” airport operations, Antaki said.
In 2018, state Department of Transportation officials approved his application for a $4.5 million grant to repave his main runway, which is longer than LaGuardia Airport in New York. But the grant expired, unspent, after township officials delayed planning meetings and Assemblyman Sean Kean (R-Monmouth), an attorney who serves as Wall Township counsel, asked transportation officials if the township could “veto” the grant application, according to emails Antaki received through public records requests.
And federal authorities dropped plans in 2019 to designate the airport as an official patient-receiving site during national disasters — a designation that would have made the airport eligible for federal grants — due to “tremendous pushback” a federal disaster aid staffer said he got from the county’s Office of Emergency Management Services, according to a lawsuit Antaki filed against the county. Sheriff Shaun Golden, who chairs the county’s Republican Party, oversees that office.
Joseph Grather, an attorney representing Antaki in the county’s eminent domain claim, called the political meddling “interference.”
“That’s just not ordinary, in my experience with eminent domain,” Grather said.
Kean and Golden did not respond to the New Jersey Monitor’s requests for comment.
Former Assemblyman Ned Thomson (R-Monmouth) went public with his support for a county takeover of the airport in a letter to the editor of the Coast-Star published in October. Thomson, a pilot and former Wall Township committeeman, and Sen. Robert Singer, a Republican who represents the same district, sponsored legislation to allow counties to manage airports as a public utility and issue bonds for airport acquisition and operation. The bill was first introduced in 2021, and Murphy signed it into law in August 2022.
“Netflix is the biggest redevelopment project in the history of the county, and we know county officials — particularly Commissioner Arnone — are involved in the redevelopment of the Fort Monmouth property, so it seems logical that the attempted seizure of the airport and its surrounding 400 acres may be connected to the Netflix development,” said Thom Ammirato, Antaki’s spokesman. “The county has given us no reason to think their condemnation plans are not tied to the Netflix project.”
Antaki said he’s spent about $300,000 to fight the condemnation.
“They’ve tarnished my image — claimed that I’m a bad owner, that I basically have run an unsafe operation, claimed that the airport has languished, effectively done everything they can to say that the airport is in bad condition, when, in reality, it’s licensed by New Jersey DOT every single year,” Antaki said.
As his battle intensifies, Antaki said he hopes Monmouth County taxpayers will join him in demanding officials be more transparent in why they want to take over the airport.
He also hopes they’ll share his concerns, saying public officials should support businesses instead of commandeering them.
“It’s a slippery slope,” Antaki said. “What’s next? Are they going to take every marina? Are they going to take the limo business down the street, the deli down the street, because they think they could run it better?”