Amherst Planning Board·August 20, 2026
48 apartments clear their first vote on Sheridan · The Town moves to sell a community center · 160 townhomes wait on the Town Board
A four-member Amherst Planning Board cleared a six-item docket in under an hour Thursday without a single dissenting vote — and did its only real bargaining over a strip of woods behind Sheridan Drive. The board recommended rezoning 1.86 acres at 3765 Sheridan Drive to MFR-5 for two three-story buildings holding 48 apartments, then rewrote the drafted "conservation easement" condition on the floor into a protective covenant to be recorded at the Erie County Clerk's Office, permanently walling off the site's southern tree line after the night's only public speaker — a Getzville Road[*] neighbor — called a 40-foot building in a one-story neighborhood "over the top." The board also recommended letting the Town rezone and sell its own former Eggertsville Community Center at 4110 Bailey Avenue, with 11 uses barred by covenant; approved a 5,896-square-foot classroom addition at Daemen University's Daemen Hall, the building MusicalFare Theater occupied for three decades; re-approved a Millersport Highway apartment building shrunk from nine units to eight after a bank refused to let the owner merge his parcels; recommended rezoning 9030–9040 Transit Road for a 10,000-square-foot daycare; and parked the biggest project on the docket — 160 townhomes at 770 John James Audubon Parkway — adjourning it until the Town Board finishes an amendment this board recommended back in June.
The night's only argument was about trees, and it produced the night's only rewritten condition. LMK Realty Associates LLC asked the board to recommend rezoning 1.86 acres at 3765 Sheridan Drive — a parcel awkwardly split between Deep Corridor 3 and R-3 zoning — to MFR-5, so it could build two three-story apartment buildings of 24 units each: 48 apartments, 12 of them one-bedroom and 36 two-bedroom, with 60 surface spaces and 16 garage spaces for 76 total.[6] Attorney Kimberly R. Nason of Phillips Lytle LLP walked the board through it; Nick Massaro of LMK explained that his family firm has been associated with the property for more than 25 years, owns the adjacent Bassett Furniture store at 3755 Sheridan Drive, and has built more than 500 apartment units over four decades, mostly in Niagara County.[6]
The petitioner arrived with an unusual explanation for the one variance it will need. MFR-5 caps buildings at 35 feet; this one is drawn at 40. The original design was a flat roof that complied — but the Town, Nason said, preferred a peaked roof, and the peak costs five feet. "We know that there was discussion with the town about height being an important factor here, but we did receive feedback that the peak design was preferred," she told the board.[6] The 0.17-acre wetland in the site's southwest corner is not jurisdictional under either state or federal rules, she said, and the plan avoids it anyway; a 21-inch sanitary sewer main bisects the parcel with no easement anyone can find on record.[6]
Board member Harbinder Singh Gill used his turn not to ask a question but to draw a line. This is a rezoning, he said, yet "a lot of site plan details have been mentioned" — and "any lack of questions from the board at this point should not be construed as approval of any site details that you have mentioned."[6] Chairman Michael J. Chmiel went after the same soft spot from the other side. The petitioner had promised to leave the wooded southern portion of the site as a buffer for the single-family homes behind it. Would they object, he asked, if the board's recommendation carried "a proviso that actually that turned into a covenant that runs with the property"?[6] The petitioner would not.
Then the one member of the public who spoke all night stood up. He gave his address as 522 Getzville Road[*], "right in back of all of that." He was blunt about the scale: a 40-foot building "where nothing is bigger than a story," in a block that is otherwise entirely residential, with the trees cleared to make room. "There's not gonna be any place for those animals to go," he said. "Just seems over the top for that neighborhood."[7] The petitioner's answer was fencing, landscaping and distance — and a reminder that the building would have been just as tall, and flatter, if the Town hadn't asked for the peak.[7]
At the vote, the board went further than the drafted paperwork. Chmiel turned to the town's counsel[*] and asked whether "conservation easement" was really the right term for condition one. It wasn't — an easement conveys rights to the Town, and nobody intended that. If the board wanted the restriction to be permanent, counsel said, the instrument should be "a protective covenant to be recorded at the Erie County Clerk's Office."[9] Chmiel had the rewritten conditions read aloud "at least for the sake of people who might be watching on the internet" before the roll was called.[9] The recommendation passed 4–0.
Three words that sound interchangeable and are not — which is why the board stopped mid-vote to swap one.
An easement hands someone else (here, the Town) an actual right in your land. A deed restriction or declaration of restriction is a limit the owner writes onto the property. A protective covenant recorded at the County Clerk's Office is a restriction that "runs with the land" — it binds every future owner, and it is findable by anyone who searches the title.
The drafted condition said "conservation easement." Nobody wanted the Town to acquire rights in the wooded strip; they wanted it to stay woods forever. So the board recorded a covenant instead. Same trees, different legal machinery — and a durable one.
Chmiel spelled this out before the first item: the Planning Board has final authority on site plans and subdivisions, but on rezonings and comprehensive-plan amendments it only makes a recommendation to the elected Town Board.[1]
Three of Thursday's six items — Sheridan Drive, Transit Road and Bailey Avenue — were rezonings. Nothing the board did to those three is final. Two — Daemen and Millersport — were site plans the board approved outright.
The last petitioner of the night worked for the Town. Laurie Stillwell[*], AICP, Amherst's Director of Community Development, asked the board to recommend rezoning 4110 Bailey Avenue — the former Eggertsville Community Center — from Community Facilities to General Business, so the Town can sell it.[8]
The building is a 1959 church, roughly 12,800 square feet, converted long ago into a community center, sitting on a 1.2-acre corner lot with 450 feet of frontage on Bailey Avenue and 112 feet on Oxford Avenue[*], plus an adjoining parking lot.[8] The reason for divesting is arithmetic: Amherst has two new community centers coming online in the same corner of town — one nearby in Eggertsville and one in the former BAC space at the Boulevard Mall — which would leave three within a few blocks of each other.[8] Maintenance on an aging building the Town no longer needs was the other half of the case.
Community Facilities zoning limits the property to governmental and quasi-public uses, which is a hard sell in an RFP. General Business opens it to retail, restaurant, professional services, office and bank uses already common up and down that stretch of Bailey. The Town's stated priority is "fostering reuse of the building rather than demolition"; the application says outright that the Town does not wish to allow the structure to come down.[8]
But the Town does not want everything General Business allows next to a residential street, so it proposed restricting about 11 use categories by covenant, and asked the board to endorse that too. Stillwell[*] read the list: ambulance service; public works or construction yard; farm and garden and farm equipment; hotel and motel; laundromat and dry cleaning; nurseries; restaurants with drive-throughs; sexually oriented businesses; vehicle sales, repair and rental or lease; cannabis dispensary; and liquor store. "We felt that these uses were a little bit inappropriate for creating reinvestment in the neighborhood," she said.[8]
No board member had a question. No member of the public spoke. The recommendation passed 4–0.[9]
The largest project on the docket got the shortest hearing and no decision at all. 770 JJAP LLC returned with the site plan for 160 for-sale townhomes on the eastern 17 acres of "Site B" of the 326-acre Muir Woods development — the same project this board sent forward on June 18, when it recommended that the Town Board amend the development's SEQR findings statement to permit townhomes instead of student housing.[2]
Two months later, the Town Board still hasn't acted. "At this point in time, we do not have the amended finding statement on this matter," the petitioner's attorney told the board, adding that they were "hopeful" it would come at the next Town Board meeting.[2] Everything else in the presentation was preview: private streets and sidewalks maintained by a homeowners association; about 200 acres of the wider Muir Woods holding to be dedicated to the Town for open space and recreation; bioretention basins for water quality because the vicinity of Ellicott Creek[*] is floodplain; a dry hydrant off the existing lake for secondary fire flow; space reserved in the southwest corner for a possible NFTA light-rail extension.[2] The engineers put the traffic case in the negative: measured against the 2021 traffic impact study, they said, the townhome plan means 71 fewer morning trips and 226 fewer evening trips.[2]
The petitioner is also asking for a stack of waivers from town code — six of them: crowned roadways instead of upright curbs; a single four-foot sidewalk on one side of the street; lot lines that stop short of the roadway centerline; turnarounds that satisfy the New York State Fire Code but not the town's; street lighting; and the pavement section and width.[2] Comments from the Town's Traffic-Safety Board landed the same week; three, the attorney said, should be covered by the waivers, and the rest were being worked out with Traffic Safety Coordinator Christopher P. Schregel[*].[2] Board members asked about the bike path's "too many 90-degree turns" and whether the water hotbox could move; the answers were yes and probably not.[2]
Then the board declined to vote on any of it. The motion was to adjourn the item — and a member pushed to make the language open-ended rather than pick a date. "Well, then we can adjourn it for two months," Chmiel offered; the member's point was that the adjournment should simply run "until the town board's done."[9] That is what carried, 4–0.
The board didn't reject 160 townhomes. It refused to review a site plan for a use that isn't legal yet.
Muir Woods Site B is governed by an amended findings statement under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQR) — the Town Board's binding conclusion, most recently amended in October 2024, about what may be built there and under what conditions. It currently allows a set of numbered development options; townhomes are not among them. Only the Town Board can add one.
So the order of operations is fixed: Town Board amends the findings → Planning Board reviews the site plan → construction. Voting the site plan first would have meant approving a project the governing document forbids. Adjourning "until the Town Board's done" keeps the file open with no clock running.
The most sentimental item of the night was also one of only two the board could decide outright. Daemen University asked for site-plan approval of a two-story, 5,896-square-foot addition to Daemen Hall, at the corner of Main Street and Getzville Road, in the Community Facilities district — classrooms, offices and lab space on a 41.5-acre campus with 20 buildings and 768 parking stalls, none of which change.[3]
University president Gary Olson[*] came to give the building's history rather than its specifications. The Sisters of St. Francis founded the school as Rosary Hill College in 1947, buying a single-family mansion to be the whole campus; Daemen Hall went up in 1949 for the theater department. About 30 years ago one of his predecessors handed the building to a fledgling theater company — MusicalFare — "to get their feet off the ground on that new venture." They stayed three decades, became "a great success," and moved out a year or two ago when the lease expired.[3] Now the university is taking it back for students.
Dan LaPietra of Carmina Wood Design handled the engineering — relocated ADA stalls, new hardscape, landscaping, utilities moved only as needed. Stephanie Hunt[*] of Silvestri Architects handled the skin: the original 1949 building loses its vinyl siding for flat panel, the new addition is brick with rowlock detailing and a soldier course at the top, and the newer MusicalFare portion — currently in stucco — simply gets painted.[3]
Not one board member had a technical question. The one comment on the record came from member Jonathan O'Rourke[*], who said he has spent his life living within a five-minute walk of the campus and had watched the university's outreach to the neighborhood improve on "just about every level." His only complaint: "you let your basketball coach get away."[3] The negative declaration passed 4–0; the site plan, with five conditions displayed on screen and waived past unread, passed 4–0.[9]
Emily's Garden Estates Inc. was back before the board five months after winning what looked like a finished approval, undone by a lender.
In March the board granted conditional site-plan approval and issued a negative declaration for a nine-unit apartment building on Millersport Highway. One of the conditions required the owner to merge two parcels. He took that condition to his bank. "Hard no," the engineer told the board, "you cannot merge these parcels."[4] He believed it was the type of loan carried on one of them.
Rather than fight it, the applicant redrew. The project came back as a standalone site plan on just the two remaining parcels — 0.43 acres each, 0.86 acres total, zoned MFR-4A since a July 2025 rezoning — with the end unit removed. "We lopped off one unit," the engineer said: nine became eight.[4] The building shifted south slightly to clear the north setback, the shared drive lane disappeared with the merger, and the result needs no variances at all. Two existing single-family houses totaling about 2,586 square feet come down; a three-story, 16,000-square-foot, eight-unit building with 29 parking spaces goes up.[4]
No board member had a question. No one from the public spoke. The board reaffirmed the March negative declaration 4–0 and approved the site plan with six conditions, 4–0.[9]
Under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, a board must decide whether an action may have a significant adverse environmental impact before it approves anything. A negative declaration — "neg dec" in the room — is the finding that it will not, which ends environmental review and clears the way for the vote on the merits.
The board issued one for this project in March. Because the applicant then withdrew that site plan and filed a new one for a smaller building on fewer parcels, the paperwork technically describes a different action — so the board reaffirmed the finding rather than relying on the old one. Eight units on the same land could hardly be worse than nine; the second vote is procedural hygiene, not a change of mind.
Bevilacqua Development LP asked the board to recommend rezoning 1.51 acres at 9030 and 9040 Transit Road from R-3 to OB — office building — to put up a 10,000-square-foot child-care center operated by The Learning Experience.[5] The parcels sit at a genuinely odd corner of Amherst: a fire hall to the north, a two-family house to the south, a golf course to the west, and Transit Road and the Town of Clarence to the east.[5]
The concept plan shows one curb cut on Transit, 43 parking spaces, a 5,000-square-foot playground fully enclosed by a six-foot white vinyl fence, 22 percent green space, and stormwater management at the front of the parcel — and, the representative stressed, it meets every OB dimensional standard for setbacks, height, landscaping and parking, requiring no variance and no special-use permit.[5] The operator runs 470 child-development centers nationally with 300-plus more in the pipeline, takes children from six weeks to five years old, and would run 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday with roughly 140 children a day.[5]
Nobody — board or public — asked a single question. The chair closed the hearing after 20 seconds of silence. The recommendation carried 4–0, with no SEQR determination and no conditions attached.[9] What is on the table is a concept plan, not an engineered one: if the Town Board grants the rezoning, a full site plan comes back to this board for the real review.
Ten recorded actions, every one unanimous at 4–0 on a roll call. Four of the seven-member board sat: Chairman Michael J. Chmiel and members Mike Hogan, Harbinder Singh Gill and Jonathan O'Rourke[*] (see the Editor's Note — the fourth surname in the opening roll call is garbled in the audio). No recusals were announced and no member abstained on any item.
Taken up immediately after roll call. Moved by O'Rourke[*], seconded by Gill; carried on roll call. The Planning Board does not meet in July, so June 18 was the previous session.
Motion to adjourn Item 1 (SP-2026-03, 160-unit for-sale townhome development) with no return date — "until after the town board has had a chance to deal with the amendment of certification of findings." A member specifically resisted naming a date so the adjournment would not lapse if the Town Board slipped; the chair had floated two months. Seconded by Hogan; carried on roll call. No public comment was offered on the item.
Negative declaration on the proposed two-story, 5,896 GSF addition to Daemen Hall (SP-1983-23_AH). Seconded by Gill; carried on roll call.
Approval of the site plan for the Daemen Hall addition subject to five conditions displayed on the meeting-room screen. The chair asked whether anyone needed them read aloud; no one did, and they were not read into the record, so their text is not recoverable from the audio — consult the Town's minutes or the approval resolution. This is a final Planning Board action, not a recommendation.
Reaffirmation of the negative declaration first issued in March 2026, now applied to the revised eight-unit site plan (SP-2026-07). Seconded by Hogan; carried on roll call.
Approval of the revised site plan — a three-story, 16,000 sq ft, eight-unit apartment building with 29 parking spaces replacing two single-family houses on 0.86 acres — subject to six conditions shown on screen. Moved by Hogan, seconded by Gill; carried on roll call. There was a roughly 40-second pause in the proceedings while the board and staff sorted out whether the item had five or six conditions before the chair restated the motion. A final Planning Board action.
Recommendation to the Town Board to rezone 1.51± acres from R-3 to OB (Z-2026-02) for a 10,000 sq ft child-care center. The chair noted there was no SEQR determination for this item and no conditions to read. Seconded by Hogan; carried on roll call. Advisory only — the Town Board decides.
Recommendation to the Town Board to rezone 1.86± acres from DC-3 and R-3 to MFR-5 (Z-2026-03). Condition 1 was rewritten on the floor at the chair's initiative, on counsel's advice, from a "conservation easement" to a recorded protective covenant. As read into the record: (1) that a protective covenant be recorded in the Erie County Clerk's Office for the undeveloped areas shown on the concept plan for the southern portion of the site; (2) that the comments of the Erie County Department of Environment and Planning, in their letter dated August 19, 2026, be considered and addressed during site plan review; (3) that the petitioner convey an easement to the Town for the existing 21-inch sanitary sewer main that bisects a portion of the subject property, and consider providing an easement for the same main where it bisects 3755 Sheridan Drive, also owned by the petitioner. Moved by O'Rourke[*], seconded by Hogan; carried on roll call.
Recommendation to the Town Board to rezone the 1.2±-acre former Eggertsville Community Center from Community Facilities to General Business (Z-2026-04), with the conditions as displayed on screen — including the Town's proposed covenant barring roughly 11 use categories otherwise permitted in GB. The conditions were not read aloud. Moved and seconded from the floor; carried on roll call. The chair did not announce a tally on this item, but four ayes are audible.
The chair confirmed no director's report was needed, thanked Planning Director Daniel C. Howard, and moved to adjourn. Seconded by Gill; carried on roll call. Per the printed agenda the next regular meeting is September 24, 2026 — the fourth Thursday, not the board's usual third.
Capture. The August 20 meeting was captured live and transcribed locally with the faster-whisper "medium" model — 58.5 minutes of audio, 1,279 segments, language confidence p=1.00. The agenda notes a public work session at 6:00 PM the same date in the Municipal Building; that session was not part of the captured stream, and nothing from it informs this brief. Every proper noun, address, file number, zoning district and docket position below is anchored to the Town's 813-page IQM2 agenda packet for August 20, 2026, which governs wherever it and the audio disagree.
Proper nouns corrected against the agenda packet (the audio rendering first): "Damon University" / "Damon Hall" → Daemen University / Daemen Hall; "Musical Fair" → MusicalFare; "Rupp Falls Graph" → Rupp Pfalzgraf LLC; "Seminelli Development" and "Eric Wagner" → Ciminelli Real Estate Corporation and Erik Wagner; "Carmina Woods" → Carmina Wood Design; "Sylvester Architects" → Silvestri Architects; "Bellville Aqua Development" → Bevilacqua Development LP; "Metzger Engineering" → Metzger Civil Engineering PLLC; "Kim Nason" → Kimberly R. Nason, Esq.; "Lori Stillwell" → Laurie Stillwell, AICP; "Alka Creek" → Ellicott Creek; "New York City DEC" → New York State DEC; and the routine transcription artifacts "seeker" → SEQR and "neck deck" → negative declaration.
Street validation. The transcript was checked against the Town's street inventory: nine street references, six exact matches. Applied: "Gettsville Road" → Getzville Road (and the same fix to "Goetzville" where the speaker located Daemen at Main and Getzville). Rejected: the tool proposed "Sharon Drive" → "Herron Drive," but the agenda packet establishes that the parcel under discussion is the petitioner's own 3755 Sheridan Drive (the Bassett Furniture store) — a suggestion applied blindly would have invented a street. Flagged, not corrected: "Sniderwood Court," where the board member's tree-line question originated, is ambiguous; the town index lists a Snyderwoods Court among other candidates, and the brief therefore does not name the street at all. The address at 4110 Bailey is described in the same application as fronting both "Oxford Street" and "Oxford Avenue"; the town street index has Oxford Avenue, used here and flagged.
Roll call — an unresolved anomaly, stated plainly. Four of seven members sat and voted on everything. Three are unambiguous: Chairman Michael J. Chmiel, who chaired; Mike Hogan and Harbinder Singh Gill, whom the chair addressed by name ("Mike," "Harb") on every item. The fourth member the chair addressed as "John" — consistent with member Jonathan O'Rourke — but the fourth surname in the opening roll call was rendered by the transcriber as "Con," which the corrections file maps to member Carrie Kahn, and the transcriber failed to capture that name at all in the nine subsequent roll calls. The two readings cannot both be right, and the audio does not settle it; the official minutes should. Separately, the printed agenda's roll-call grid lists Chmiel, Davis, Gill, Kahn, O'Rourke, Penberthy and Raffaele — substituting Councilmember John Davis, the board's liaison and not a voting member, for member Mike Hogan. This is the same template artifact flagged in the June 18 brief and should not be read as a change in the board's membership. The seven-member roster itself was verified 2026-06-17 against the Town's official Planning Board page and is used normally here.
Names heard only in audio — unverified, marked [*]. Agendas list entities, not the people who speak for them. Confirmed by the packet and therefore unflagged: Kimberly R. Nason, Nick Massaro, Erik Wagner, Dan LaPietra, Daniel C. Howard. Flagged as audio-only: Daemen president Gary Olson; architect Stephanie Hunt (the packet's project-team block lists "S. Hunt" of Silvestri, which matches but does not confirm the first name); engineer Jake Metzger; Traffic Safety Coordinator Christopher P. Schregel (named only as "Chris" in the audio and matched from the corrections file); the town counsel the chair addressed as "Sean," who supplied the covenant language and is described here by role only; and the representative who presented for Bevilacqua Development, whose name the transcriber garbled beyond recovery and who is likewise described by role. The listed applicant contact for Emily's Garden Estates Inc. appears in the packet under a surname that does not match the "Kevin Weiss" heard in the audio; no owner name is asserted in this brief. The lone public speaker did not give his name, only his address.
Address cross-reference. All six subject properties — 770 John James Audubon Parkway, 4380 Main Street, 3230 and 3238 Millersport Highway, 9030 and 9040 Transit Road, 3765 Sheridan Drive and 4110 Bailey Avenue — were checked against this publication's address database of emergency-dispatch traffic recorded since May 2026. None returned any incident history, so none is reported. [*] marks a proper noun corrected from a likely transcription error or one that no official document confirms; verify against the Town Clerk's record before quoting in any formal communication.