Town of Amherst Town Board·August 31, 2026
Five bonds in three minutes · A golf plea unanswered · The card players return · Kingsgate says thank you
The board authorized $1,615,000 of new borrowing in five bond resolutions that consumed less than three minutes and drew no discussion from the dais — $715,000 for North Forest Park renovations, $500,000 for a replacement building at the Audubon golf course's par-3 layout, $175,000 for police information technology, $125,000 for a stairway replacement, and $100,000 whose purpose was never stated aloud. Minutes earlier a longtime advocate for the town's golf program had asked the board to table the Audubon money, arguing the par 3 will be “non-existent” within two years once Erie County finishes rebuilding the course next door; no board member answered him, and the bond carried 5–0. Senior-center card players came back for another month to demand the town rescind its low-stakes gambling ban; two residents opened budget season with a pop quiz on the town's total liabilities and a warning about a long-term debt they put at $192 million; and a Kingsgate neighbor returned — three weeks after the town tore out his playground overnight — to say thank you for $500,000 in state money to rebuild it.
Chris Drungoski[*] had spent twenty years around the Town of Amherst's golf program, and he came to the podium on Monday night with a request the board could grant in one word: wait. The $500,000 the town was about to borrow for “Audubon Golf Course renovations”[*] was not, he said, for the golf course at all. It was to replace a building on the par-3 layout — a nine that gets so little play and has deteriorated so far that it has “become the laughing stock of the golf community.”
His argument was a business argument. Erie County is rebuilding the old Westwood course next door — a project he called “phenomenal” and said had gone “beyond my expectations” — and when it opens, Amherst's league and nine-hole players will simply walk across the property line. “In two years, that par three will be non-existent,” he said. He offered the board a different shopping list for the same half-million: drainage for a driving-range field that sits underwater every spring, which he estimated is worth $50,000 to $60,000 a year in lost profit; a range dispensing building he called obsolete and a ball machine he called “shot”; and cart paths, without which, this spring, “people could not play.” He asked for a meeting with the facilities' general manager and any board members who would come. The board granted him two extra minutes at the podium. It did not grant him the meeting, or a delay.
Seven minutes later the supervisor moved Resolution 2026-644[*], the Audubon bond, without comment. It passed 5–0 on a voice roll call. Nobody on the dais mentioned the par 3, the county project, or Drungoski[*] by name.
It was the second of five bond resolutions that ran back-to-back at the end of the meeting, each preceded by its own environmental determination, the whole package moving from first motion to final “yes” in two minutes and thirty-three seconds. Together they authorize $1,615,000 in new borrowing: $715,000 for North Forest Park renovations (an amended bond), $500,000 for Audubon, $175,000 for Amherst Police Department information-technology improvements, $100,000 for a purpose the board never spoke aloud, and $125,000 for what the supervisor called the “NARC”[*] stairway replacement — an acronym said once, never expanded, and not verifiable without the agenda.
That $1,615,000 figure is not this publication's arithmetic alone. Don Smith[*] of North Long Street, speaking during public expression before any of it was voted, told the board the night's docket carried “$1.615 million in bonds” — a number that matches the five approved resolutions to the dollar.
None of Monday's five votes spent money. A bond resolution authorizes the town to borrow it — to sell debt and repay it, with interest, out of future tax levies. That is why these items get their own roll calls while far larger operating expenses ride the consent agenda, and it is why a resident's objection about timing carries weight: a bond commits taxpayers for years to a decision made in seconds. As Smith[*] put it from the podium, “when you spend it on one thing, you cannot spend it on something else, because you don't have it anymore.”
Each bond was preceded by a separate motion the audio renders as a “seeker determination.” The word is SEQR — the State Environmental Quality Review Act, which requires a New York board to make an environmental finding before it approves an action, not after. For routine building and equipment work the finding is usually that no further review is needed. Procedurally it means every capital item on this agenda needed two motions, and a reader watching the video will hear ten votes where there are five projects.
Five residents spoke Monday, and four of them talked about money. The sharpest moment came from Spike Mertes[*], a U.S. Army veteran who framed the coming 2027 budget against household budgets: families, he said, are delaying purchases and tracking every expense, and “town governments should be held to the same standard of financial discipline.” He then put a question to the dais and stopped talking. “Without looking at your phones, computers, or notes, can any member of the Amherst town board tell us what the town [of] Amherst total primary liabilities were at the end of 2025?” A beat, and then: “I'll wait for your answer.” None came; public expression is not a dialogue, and the board answers, when it answers, after the microphone is closed.
Mertes[*] listed what he called troubling examples. He returned to the New York State Comptroller audit this publication covered on August 10, putting roughly $1.4 million of employee-benefit payments in a two-year window (2023 and 2024) at issue for lacking supporting documentation.[*] He said the town is handing $756,000[*] of prime property at 330 Maple Road to an entity the audio renders as “716 Sports,”[*] in a deal he said includes a conservation zone that bars structures but allows two driveways. And he counted two six-figure positions in the supervisor's office that he said did not exist before 2018, at a combined cost he put above a quarter-million dollars a year, against a proposed budget he said exceeds $178 million. He closed with a complaint about laptops on the dais: “Do we have to treat you like the school's doing, take away your electronics?”
Smith[*] followed with the structural version of the same worry. Citing EMMA[*], the online municipal-securities disclosure database, he said the town's long-term debt has climbed from about $86 million in 2020 to $192 million in 2025. “So we better be spending it wisely, because we have to pay it back,” he said, “and paying it back requires us to tax our people to pay it back.” He also flagged that fifteen items on the night's docket sat under the town attorney's heading, and wondered aloud whether that placement makes them all subject to attorney-client privilege — “if I'm wrong, tell me I'm wrong.” Nobody did.
Supervisor Shawn Lavin answered the budget theme rather than the specific numbers. The town, he said, “is not immune to 4.5% inflation,” and is paying nearly 20 percent more for fuel than a year ago — a cost driven by police cars and snowplows, and, he said, one “that we had no responsibility in creating.” On the laptops, he was direct: he asked members to bring them, so the board can pull up a map, a prior resolution or a state data point mid-meeting, “because sometimes we want to get answers to questions from our residents.” The liabilities question itself went unanswered on the record.
Before the bonds, the town clerk read a list of about seventy-five items — town attorney 6 through 15, seven building-maintenance items, seven engineering items, ten human-resources items, police, sewer, highway, youth and rec, six public-improvement permits — and the board adopted every one of them in a single unrecorded voice vote lasting about five seconds. That is what a consent agenda is: routine business bundled so a board need not vote ninety times. It is also where the substance of a meeting can disappear. Two of the items belonged to Councilmember Michael Szukala, and the supervisor noted they had been “taken care of during our work session earlier this afternoon” — a session that was not captured for this brief, leaving no public record here of what was said about them.
Don Steinschult[*], an Amherst resident and a member of the euchre club at the Senior Center, opened public expression by reporting that his last appearance had gone nowhere. “My concerns fell on deaf ears, just as I predicted they would,” he said, describing the reply he got as reading like a form letter. So he converted his complaints into questions, on the theory that questions get answers.
He asked four. Why was the resolution banning low-stakes gambling at the Senior Center not visible on the town's YouTube feed — and, if it was adopted out of public view, is that even legal? Why is gambling still going on at the Audubon golf course, and why isn't the town attorney enforcing the same rule there? Why were the members involved in the underlying dispute not barred from the center instead, rather than “punish[ing] all for the actions of a few”? And which neighboring communities' rules did Amherst follow — because, he said, it was not West Seneca and it was not Cheektowaga.[*] He ended with a warning that was less a question than a forecast: the protests “will continue until this resolution is rescinded,” and the seniors' voices “will be heard loudest come election time.” Then, the closer: “Is it really worth losing an election over something as petty as this?”
Lavin declined to relitigate it. He had spoken about the senior center and gambling “many times the last few months,” he said, and pointed anyone curious to the town's YouTube archive going back to January. He did not address the claim that the ban was adopted outside public view, and this publication cannot verify from the available record when or how the resolution was adopted — the assertion here is the speaker's, not a finding. A resident's aside about gambling at the senior center also surfaced at the August 10 meeting; this is a live thread, not a one-off.
Three weeks ago this board sat through an hour of grief over the Kingsgate Park playground, which town crews demolished over a weekend without telling the neighborhood or the Little League that plays beside it. Matt Dubois[*] spoke then. He came back Monday for the other half of the transaction.
An assemblymember whose surname the audio gives as McMahon[*] has secured $500,000 in state funding for a new playground, Dubois[*] told the board, and he thanked the supervisor, the deputy supervisor, a Youth and Recreation staffer[*] and “everyone at the town who worked together to help move this project forward.” Then he said the thing that is easy to skip: “I just thought it's important when residents come here and raise concerns that we also come back and say thank you when those concerns are heard.” His kids, he added, are looking forward to helping design it.
Lavin called the turn “a wonderful kind of kismet moment” and put a date on the next step: community engagement on the playground design begins in October. “I'm really excited for the next generation to have an impact on that playground,” he said.
The board amended its environmental findings for 17.13 acres of land at Muir Woods on a voice vote with no discussion. This is almost certainly the item the board adjourned from its August 10 meeting to this date — a SEQR findings amendment for Muir Woods Site B, described three weeks ago as being at 770 John James Audubon Parkway and held for planning and legal work. The resolution number does not carry over. On August 10 the item was Resolution 2026-548; on Monday the supervisor read it, hesitantly, as “695” — a number that sits far outside the 642–647 range of everything else on the docket. With no agenda to check, this brief reports the number as spoken and flags it as unreliable.
Two threads from August 10 did not resurface in open session. The Harlem Road Community Center auditorium rental fee (Resolution 2026-637), also adjourned to August 31 for legal language, was never mentioned aloud; if it moved, it moved inside the consent agenda or at the uncaptured afternoon work session. And the license-plate-reader cameras — whose state-highway installation permits this board rejected 2–3 on August 10, leaving a roughly $300,000 Axon/Flock contract with nowhere approved to stand — did not return in any form. Neither did the denied landmark designation at 4467 Main Street.
The board's one other substantive open-session resolution was Councilmember John Davis's Resolution 2026-642[*], a statement of support for the Legacy Village affordable senior housing project[*]. It was moved, seconded and carried on a voice vote in eleven seconds. No sponsor, location, unit count or funding program was stated on the record, and there is no agenda to supply them.
The meeting's warmest twelve minutes had nothing to do with money. Under the town's good-deed initiative, begun in January, two young siblings — Roland and Paige[*], first names as read from the dais — were called up with their parents for certificates. The family's tradition is that each child picks a service project for their birthday starting at age five; Roland cleaned up his neighborhood after trash day and helped weed the gardens at a local Catholic church, and both held a bake sale for infants and mothers. Asked why, the certificates recorded, they said they like to help, they like “when other people are happy,” and they want to do more trash pickup. Lavin, holding a certificate at arm's length, narrated his own stagecraft: “I'm just gonna hold this like Bob Barker here.”
The evening opened with two memorials. Councilmember Jack Kavanaugh honored Michael Bettino[*], a retired New York State safety inspector, former member of the Erie County hazmat team, and a volunteer for more than 43 years with the Eggertsville Hose Company[**] — Kavanaugh's own fire company. Councilmember Michael Szukala honored Jack Hannity[*], a chef at the former Little White House restaurant[*] and a visiting chef at the White House during the Johnson administration, who served one term as Erie County's 14th District legislator before buying the Eagle House[*] in 1976 and went on to publish several books. Lavin added condolences for the longtime supervisor of a neighboring Erie County town, dead after twelve years in office; this brief does not print his name or his town, because the audio's rendering of both could not be reconciled with any municipality on record and guessing at a eulogy is worse than omitting it. Councilmember Davis's invocation remembered a fatal accident in Amherst, the dead and missing in Nepal, and Dolly Parton.
Deputy Supervisor Angela Marinucci announced that the town's 9/11 ceremony of remembrance falls on the 25th anniversary this year — Friday, September 11, at 9 a.m. at Amherst Memorial Hill Grove[*], with a military flyover requested. She marked the retirement of Susan Mahoney[*] after more than 36 years in the Department of Youth and Recreation, and recognized three North Amherst volunteer firefighters for 50 years of service apiece. Two of the three are named in the audio as Jeffrey L. Main[*] and Joel K. Smith[*]; the third man's surname did not transcribe cleanly, and rather than misspell a fifty-year honoree this brief withholds all three spellings' certainty and asks readers to check the minutes. The night's final act of business, taken after a motion to suspend the regular order, sent Szukala to the Association of Towns' annual legislative priority session as Amherst's voting delegate, with Kavanaugh as alternate.
Amherst runs two kinds of votes, and they carry very different evidentiary weight. Most business — the minutes, the consent agenda, every SEQR determination, the Legacy Village[*] resolution, the Muir Woods findings, the delegate appointment, adjournment — passes on a collective voice vote: the chair says “all those in favor,” the room says “aye,” and no individual position is recorded. Those rows below read “Approved (voice).” They do not mean unanimous, and this brief does not claim they were. No audible “no” was cast on any of them, and no recusal was announced at any point in the meeting. The five bond resolutions instead went to a name-by-name voice roll call, and those are reported member by member. One caveat there: on the North Forest Park bond, the clerk called the Deputy Supervisor's name and the recording contains no answer before the next name is called — so that item is reported as four recorded ayes, not five. The same gap appears in the opening attendance roll, where only three “present” responses were captured; all five members demonstrably participated in the meeting.
Five-member board (Supervisor Shawn Lavin, Deputy Supervisor Angela Marinucci, Councilmembers John Davis, Jack Kavanaugh and Michael Szukala), all five participating. No recusal was announced. Resolution numbers were spoken aloud and could not be checked against an agenda — treat them as approximate. Outcomes are provisional pending the official minutes.
Moved without comment roughly seven minutes after a member of the public asked the board to table it. Yes: Lavin, Marinucci, Szukala, Davis, Kavanaugh. The speaker said the money funds a replacement building on the par-3 layout rather than course work; the board did not respond on the record.
The largest single borrowing of the night. On the roll call, recorded yes: Lavin, Szukala, Davis, Kavanaugh. The clerk called the Deputy Supervisor's name and no answer is audible on the recording before the next name; this brief therefore records four ayes and does not assert a fifth. No audible “no” was cast.
Police department IT. No description beyond the title was read into the record. Yes: Lavin, Marinucci, Szukala, Davis, Kavanaugh.
The board approved a $100,000 bond identified on the record only by number. The item was never described, and with no agenda available this publication cannot say what it funds. Yes: Lavin, Marinucci, Szukala, Davis, Kavanaugh.
The acronym was spoken once and never expanded; it is most likely a town recreation facility, but that is not established by the record. Yes: Lavin, Marinucci, Szukala, Davis, Kavanaugh.
Moved, seconded and carried on a collective “all those in favor / aye.” No individual positions were recorded and no audible dissent was cast. New York requires a board to make its environmental finding before it approves the action, which is why each bond needed two motions.
Taken out of order: the supervisor moved the bond first, caught the omission — “Oh wait, I'm sorry, I have to approve seeker” — and took the environmental vote before the bond vote. Moved, seconded and carried on a collective “all those in favor / aye.” No individual positions were recorded and no audible dissent was cast. New York requires a board to make its environmental finding before it approves the action, which is why each bond needed two motions.
Moved, seconded and carried on a collective “all those in favor / aye.” No individual positions were recorded and no audible dissent was cast. New York requires a board to make its environmental finding before it approves the action, which is why each bond needed two motions.
Moved, seconded and carried on a collective “all those in favor / aye.” No individual positions were recorded and no audible dissent was cast. New York requires a board to make its environmental finding before it approves the action, which is why each bond needed two motions.
Moved, seconded and carried on a collective “all those in favor / aye.” No individual positions were recorded and no audible dissent was cast. New York requires a board to make its environmental finding before it approves the action, which is why each bond needed two motions.
Amended environmental findings for 17.13 acres of land at Muir Woods, carried on a collective voice vote with no discussion. Almost certainly the Muir Woods Site B item adjourned from the August 10 meeting to this date, where it was Resolution 2026-548. The number read aloud Monday — “695” — is out of sequence with everything else on the docket and is reported here only as spoken.
Councilmember Davis's resolution, the only councilmember resolution taken in open session. Moved, seconded, carried in about eleven seconds. Sponsor, address, unit count and funding program were not stated on the record.
Read aloud by the town clerk as a list of department headings and item numbers: councilmember (Szukala) 1–2; town attorney 6–15; town clerk 1; building maintenance 1–7; central alarm 1; controller 1–2; contract compliance 1–6; emergency services 1; engineering 1–7; highway 1–2; human resources 1–10; planning 2–5; police 1–3; senior services 1–3; sewer 1–6; youth and rec 1–2; two communications (one consent, one referred to the town attorney); and six public-improvement permits. No item was described. Adopted in a single collective voice vote.
Moved by the supervisor to go off the regular scheduled agenda so the board could take a single suspension item. Seconded and carried on a collective voice vote; no roll call taken.
Introduced by Deputy Supervisor Marinucci: Councilmember Szukala appointed delegate to cast the Town of Amherst's vote at the Association of Towns' 2026 annual legislative priority session, Councilmember Kavanaugh appointed alternate, and Szukala authorized to attend. Moved, seconded and carried on a collective voice vote.
Moved and seconded immediately after the attendance roll; carried on “all those in favor” with no audible dissent. The minutes themselves were not read.
Moved by the supervisor and seconded. Five residents spoke. Amherst holds a single public-expression period; the mid-meeting slot was eliminated this year, a change two residents protested at the August 10 meeting.
The speaker asked the board to yield him a couple more minutes; a member moved it, another seconded, and it carried. He used the time to itemize the driving-range drainage, dispensing building and cart-path work he argued should have the $500,000 instead.
Closed after the supervisor twice invited further comment from the audience and got none. The supervisor's responses to the speakers followed the close, as is the board's practice.
Moved by the supervisor at approximately 35 minutes 27 seconds; carried on a voice vote. No executive session was announced on the record.
No agenda was available for this meeting. The Town of Amherst agenda packet for August 31, 2026 was never retrieved into this publication's working files — the most recent Amherst Town Board agenda on hand is August 10 — so the mandatory agenda cross-check that normally verifies applicant names, entity names, project titles, addresses, dollar figures and resolution numbers could not be run for a single item in this brief. Everything above rests on machine transcription of the audio. Proper nouns are therefore flagged [*] far more liberally than usual, and every name, figure and resolution number here should be verified against the Town Clerk's posted minutes before any formal use. Resolution numbers spoken aloud are the least reliable class of fact in this brief; the Muir Woods item, read as “695,” is very likely the item this board carried over as 2026-548 on August 10, and is reported as spoken rather than reconciled.
Cross-checked against the previous meeting's agenda (added September 2). Since this brief first published, the August 10 Town Board agenda packet — a 17,000-line printed document the Town did post — was used as a substitute proper-noun source for everything that recurs between the two meetings. It confirms in print: Supervisor Shawn Lavin, Deputy Supervisor Angela Marinucci, and Councilmembers Michael Szukala, John B. Davis and Jack Kavanaugh; the Audubon Golf Course (a Town facility, named in the fee schedule); North Forest Park, where an August 10 item moved a splash pad from Willowdale Park; “Muir Woods – Site B” at 770 John James Audubon Parkway, the subject of the amended SEQR findings heard again on August 31; the NARC stairway replacement as a capital line; and Eggertsville Hose Company. Those names have had their verification flags removed. The packet also supplies two names this brief could only give by office: the Town Clerk is Francina J. Spoth and the Town Attorney is Steven B. Bengart — consistent with the “Steve” addressed from the dais, though the identification is by office rather than by voice, and the brief continues to refer to both by title. One caution the packet raises about itself: it renders the attorney as “Steven B. Bengart” in the resolution record and signature block but “Stephen B. Bengart, Esq.” in an attached memorandum, so the Town's own document is inconsistent on the spelling of his first name.
What the cross-check did NOT confirm, and one thing it nearly got wrong. The August 10 packet contains no trace of the residents who spoke on August 31, nor of 716 Sports, Legacy Village, the Eagle House, North Amherst Fire Company, Amherst Memorial Hill Grove, or the Kingsgate playground; all of those remain unverified and flagged. A near-miss worth recording: the packet does contain the name “McMahon” — but as McMahon & Mann Consulting Engineers, P.C., the geotechnical firm in the Muir Woods environmental record, which has nothing to do with the Assemblymember credited on August 31 with a playground grant. Treating that as a match would have put the wrong identity in print. The Assemblymember's name remains flagged and unconfirmed. Resolution numbers spoken aloud on August 31 are still unverified: an agenda from three weeks earlier cannot confirm a later meeting's docket numbering.
What was verified. The Amherst Town Board roster is verified (2026-06-17, re-confirmed againstofficial June 8, 2026 minutes), and it is the single strongest anchor available here: board-member names are stated normally and without flags, corrected from the audio's Leopold / Levin / Laban to Lavin, Marinochi / Maranucci to Marinucci, Zucalo / Zucalla / Zukawa to Szukala, and Cavanaugh to Kavanaugh. The clerk's roll call independently confirms Marinucci as Deputy Supervisor for 2026, a designation this publication's records had carried as unconfirmed. Street validation was run against the town's 1,348-street official index: both street references in the transcript — Maple Road and Mill Street — matched exactly, with nothing ambiguous or unknown. One street was validated by hand because it was spoken without a street-type word and the tool did not extract it: a speaker's “North Long” is rendered here as North Long Street, which appears on the index. Other applied corrections: “seeker” to SEQR; “Egretsville” to Eggertsville, the Amherst hamlet; “Cheetah Waga” to Cheektowaga; and “Euker” to euchre.
What we would not print. Several proper nouns were too garbled to render responsibly and are described by role instead of guessed at. The neighboring town whose late supervisor the board memorialized is not named, because neither his name nor his town as transcribed matches any Erie County municipality on record. The town attorney, addressed from the dais only as “Steve,” is identified by office. A question a speaker directed to someone named “Kelly” is left unattributed; no one on the verified roster or staff list bears that name. The White House chef under whom a memorialized restaurateur trained is described by role, and the private country club a golf speaker invoked as a standard is described rather than named. The surname of one of three fifty-year volunteer firefighters did not transcribe cleanly, and this brief withholds certainty on all three. A speaker introduced himself with a middle phrase that did not transcribe and is given by name and service only. Another speaker gave his village as “Wintersville”; the village is omitted and only his street, which validated exactly, is printed. One transcription artifact inverts a speaker's meaning: the audio has him saying benefit payments were made “with proper supporting documentation,” which contradicts the rest of his sentence and the audit he was citing; it is reported here as lacking documentation, and flagged. A speaker thanked from the dais as “Dawn” introduced himself as “Don”; the given name is uncertain. Children recognized for good deeds are given by first name only, as read into the public record.
What is missing. The board's afternoon work session, where two councilmember resolutions were disposed of before the evening meeting, was not captured and is not reflected here beyond the supervisor's one-sentence reference to it. Per house policy a work session is folded into the parent board's brief rather than published separately; there was nothing to fold. The property at 330 Maple Road, raised from the podium, was cross-referenced against this publication's scanner entity record and shows a single mention since May 2026 — no pattern, nothing a reader needs, and so it is not in the story. The [*] convention is explained in Sources; [**] marks the Eggertsville hamlet correction.