A Hopkins Road expansion clears, minus the sidewalk · Muir Woods drops student housing for townhomes · A neighbor pleads for fresh studies
In a roughly 89-minute session that cleared its entire two-item public-hearing agenda without a dissenting vote, the Amherst Planning Board approved a long-planned building addition for the Center for Jewish Life at 757 Hopkins Road — stripping out a required sidewalk the petitioner argued no one would use, while ordering new solid fencing to screen a frustrated next-door neighbor. It then recommended that the Town Board amend its decades-old environmental findings for "Muir Woods Site B" to allow 160 for-sale townhomes in place of long-envisioned student housing, over an adjacent owner's detailed plea for updated traffic and environmental studies.
The first public hearing was, in form, a routine site-plan approval — an addition to the Center for Jewish Life's existing building on Hopkins Road. In substance, it turned on a single question the board wrestled with for the better part of an hour: whether to make the applicant pour concrete for sidewalks. The petitioner's attorney laid out the project: an addition of roughly 3,700 square feet — slightly less than the 4,000-square-foot expansion the board had approved years earlier — plus additional parking, to give the congregation room its single multipurpose space can no longer provide.[1] Today, he explained, one room hosts religious services and is then cleared and reset for a meal; the addition would let those functions live in separate rooms.[1]
The Center, the attorney said, runs an expanding roster of programs — kosher meals on wheels, an early-childhood and in-school program, addiction-intervention counseling, and religious services — that have outgrown the building.[1] The Zoning Board of Appeals had already granted the side- and rear-yard setback variances the addition required.[1]
The friction came over a drafted condition requiring sidewalks: one running from the building out to the right-of-way across green space, and another fronting the adjacent property to the north. The attorney pushed back hard, arguing the Town could not compel improvements on a neighbor's land, that liability and enforceability cut against it, and that the building-to-street walk would carve up green space for a path "nobody's going to use," since children already cross the parking lot without incident.[1] The board agreed to drop the sidewalk requirement — but did not let the site off free.
In its place, the board wrote fence conditions to address a long-aggrieved neighbor: the east fence to be replaced in its entirety at eight feet, solid; and along the south property line, a solid fence running from the southeast corner at six feet to a midpoint near the original building, then stepping down to four feet, stopping short of a sanitary-sewer easement.[2] Waste would be handled with screened totes rather than a dumpster the cramped site couldn't service.[2] Both the environmental determination and the site-plan approval passed 6–0.[3]
The night's second hearing asked the board for something narrower than an approval: a recommendation to the Town Board. The petitioner, 770 JJAP LLC, sought to amend the State Environmental Quality Review (SEQR) findings statement for "Muir Woods Site B" so the eastern portion of the parcel could be developed as a 160-unit, for-sale townhome community.[4] The original 2002-era findings, the petitioner's representative explained, had contemplated commercial space or as many as roughly 500 student-housing units across the larger site; the west side was since built out at about 197 units, and the market showed no appetite for additional student housing on the eastern half.[4] A current market study, he said, pointed to owner-occupied townhomes instead.[4]
Because 160 lower-density homes would generate impacts below what the original findings already analyzed, the petitioner argued, the amendment was justified. He noted the plan carves out a southwestern area for a possible future NFTA transit station, relocates but preserves an existing bike path, and sits on a site already rough-graded, with wetland mitigation completed, drainage built, on-site stormwater bio-treatment planned, and parcels to the north and west slated for dedication to the Town.[4] A full site-plan application would still return to the board later.[4]
The lone public comment cut against the timeline. An adjacent property owner, who said he had submitted written comments for the record, urged the board to require updated, site-specific environmental and traffic studies before recommending anything.[5] Fewer units do not mean fewer impacts, he argued: the review leaned on a generic study nearly two decades old, the for-sale townhome use was "not previously contemplated," the project would add some 7.3 acres of new impervious surface draining to an on-site lake and a creek the state lists as impaired for phosphorus, the parcel sits in the 100- and 500-year floodplain, and nearly all vegetation would be cleared.[5] He said wetlands on site host protected species — he regularly sees great blue herons on the water — yet the environmental check was a database lookup, not a field survey, and the traffic baseline dated to roughly 2003–2005, despite the Town's own findings calling for the traffic study to be updated at Site B's full build-out.[5]
The board recommended approval anyway, 6–0, attaching a condition requiring the petitioner to submit drafts of all required easements and site plans to the Planning Department and Town Attorney for review before the Town Board acts, with the easements recorded at the County Clerk's office and recorded copies furnished, ahead of any Town Board decision on the findings amendment.[6]
The Planning Board does not approve a rezoning or a SEQR findings amendment — it makes a recommendation to the Town Board, which holds the decision. So tonight's 6–0 vote is advisory: it forwards a favorable recommendation, plus an easement-review condition, to the elected Town Board. The neighbor's request for updated environmental and traffic studies is therefore a question the Town Board can still weigh; it was not resolved in the petitioner's favor here so much as passed upward.
Two public-hearing items, each carrying an environmental step and an action, plus housekeeping — every recorded vote unanimous at 6–0. Six of the seven-member board were present and voting; the audio confirms Chairman Michael Chmiel and members Mike Hogan, Jonathan O'Rourke, BrittanyLee Penberthy and Carrie Kahn participating, with one of the remaining members (Joseph Raffaele or Harbinder Singh Gill) the apparent absentee. The roster was verified against the Town's official Planning Board page (see Editor's Note).
SEQR determination on the proposed ~3,700 sq ft building addition, taken before the board formalized the site-plan action. Carried on roll call.
Motion to approve the site plan with the drafted conditions amended on the floor: the sidewalk condition (drafted condition 5) removed; in its place, the east fence to be replaced in full at 8 ft solid, and a solid fence on the south property line running 6 ft from the southeast corner to a midpoint near the original building then transitioning to 4 ft, stopping short of the sanitary-sewer easement; waste handled by screened totes rather than a dumpster. Setback variances previously granted by the ZBA. Seconded (Hogan); carried on roll call.
Motion to recommend that the Town Board amend the SEQR certification of findings for Muir Woods Site B to permit a 160-unit for-sale townhome development on the eastern portion of the site, subject to a condition that the petitioner submit drafts of all required easements and site plans (pursuant to the Site B project approvals) to the Planning Department and Town Attorney's office for review and approval of content and form prior to the Town Board's decision; all required easements to be recorded at the County Clerk's office before that decision, with recorded copies provided to the Planning Department and Town Attorney. The Planning Board is advisory on the findings amendment. Seconded; carried on roll call.
The board returned to an item it had briefly skipped — approval of the May 21, 2026 minutes — and authorized a letter, to be drafted and circulated by email for the chairman's signature, recommending the Town Board take up sidewalks on Hopkins Road rather than condition them onto the Center for Jewish Life. Carried on roll call. (The exact pairing of these housekeeping actions is approximate; see Editor's Note.)
This is the first brief published for the Town of Amherst, and it was produced under non-standard conditions. The Town's live YouTube capture on June 18 failed: three overlapping capture attempts collided and the recording that landed afterward was corrupt and undecodable. This brief was rebuilt by re-downloading the meeting's posted video-on-demand ("6/18/2026 Planning Board Meeting") directly from the Town of Amherst YouTube channel and transcribing it locally. Because the recovery ran outside the usual pipeline hardware, transcription used the faster-whisper "base" model rather than the pipeline's standard "medium" model — meaning a higher homophone/error rate in the raw audio. Project facts, addresses, file numbers and entity names are therefore anchored to the official IQM2 agenda packet for June 18, 2026 (which governs every proper noun), with the transcript used for discussion, motions and outcomes.
Roster verification. The seven-member Planning Board roster was verified on June 19, 2026 against the Town of Amherst's official Planning Board page: Chairman Michael J. Chmiel, Esq.; members Mike Hogan, Carrie Kahn, Jonathan O'Rourke, BrittanyLee Penberthy, Joseph P. Raffaele, Jr., and Harbinder Singh Gill; Councilmember John Davis is the board's liaison, not a voting member. Note: the printed agenda's roll-call grid listed "Davis" in a member row — this appears to be a template artifact (the liaison's name), as the meeting audio records Chmiel chairing and Hogan, O'Rourke, Penberthy and Kahn participating and voting, with no "Davis" among them. Every recorded vote was 6–0, indicating six of seven members present; the audio does not cleanly resolve which of Raffaele or Gill was absent. The Town's official minutes for June 18 were not yet posted at publication and should be used to confirm the exact attendance and roll-call detail.
Names heard only in audio — treat as unverified. The petitioner's attorney for Item 1, the petitioner's representative and engineer for Item 2 ("Muir Woods"), the planning-staff member who articulated the conditions, and the resident who spoke against Item 2 were all rendered by an imperfect transcript and are intentionally described by role rather than named here; verify against the official minutes before attributing any statement to a named individual. Per house practice, this internal review note carries no disclosure into the published copy beyond what appears here.