Town of Amherst Town Board·September 14, 2026
A demolition on a voice vote · Twelve votes, no roll call · “Friends and family” · August's bonds never came back
The board voted to demolish a collapsing church and the house behind it at 790 Dodge Road — 3.34 acres the town says has drawn 34 police calls, carries a little over $23,000 in back taxes, and belongs to someone nobody in Amherst government has been able to reach. The cost of knocking it down will be charged to a parcel whose owner the town cannot find. It passed, like every other action taken Monday night, on a collective “all those in favor”: twelve voice votes, and not one roll call — a striking contrast with two weeks earlier, when five bond resolutions each got a name-by-name poll. A resident told the board its plan to hire without civil-service testing “stinks of the friends and family program”; the supervisor answered at length that applicants have simply dried up. A neighbor brought photographs of a landmarked house at 22 Chateau Terrace she says is being allowed to rot inside an active construction site, and got a public hearing date of November 9. A forty-year town volunteer asked for $75,000 toward a retention pond eating his driveway and received no answer on the record. The Board of Ethics reported no conflicts among more than 200 employee disclosures and proposed replacing the town's two forms with one — received, filed, and referred to counsel for 2027. And none of August's business came back: not the $1,615,000 in bonds, not the contested Audubon golf money, not the Kingsgate playground, not the state audit, and not the $100,000 resolution whose purpose the board never said out loud.
The photographs did most of the arguing. Flooded hallways with the ceilings down in them. A music room with a piano still standing in the wreck of the floor. A library, its books rotting where they sat. The skull of an animal on a carpet. And, in the house behind the church, a bedroom with children's clothes and toys still in it — a detail the town's code-enforcement supervisor, addressed from the dais only as Bill,[*] kept coming back to. “It looked as if they had moved out like just on the fly,” he said, “like in the middle of the night.”
He was presenting for the Commissioner of Buildings, Mark Berke,[*] who was not there, and the ask was blunt: authorize the Town of Amherst to tear down both structures at 790 Dodge Road, the former University Baptist Church of Amherst[*] and the residence behind it. The church went up in 1967, the house in 1970; together they sit on 3.34 acres listed, unusually, as two properties on one site. The last time either was used, he estimated, was three or four years ago.
Supervisor Shawn Lavin did the arithmetic out loud. “That much damage in three to four years?” Yes.
The record he read into the minutes ran back to 2015: property-maintenance violations, fire-safety violations, grass cut by a town contractor six to eight times a year — most recently the Friday before the meeting — two abandoned vehicles towed off the rear lot, doors and broken entrances boarded and re-boarded as people kept breaking back in. Amherst police, he said, have responded to 34 calls at the property, 14 of them since it went vacant, on complaints he listed as criminal mischief, vandalism, animal control and possible squatters. Inside, the roof is collapsing, the building has flooded, and there is black mold and asbestos throughout. He was delicate about the wildlife. Residents, he said, report “large mice” because they don't like to cause a disturbance — “but they really mean rats.” The town obtained warrants from the town justice to enter both buildings.
Then came the question that has no good answer. A councilmember asked whether the demolition would be billed to the owner. It would — charged onto the tax roll against the parcel. “And do we know the owner?” “We do not.” The town has tried every avenue it knows, including asking the police for help. “That's like they just picked up and left town,” the councilmember said. The parcel is a little over $23,000 behind on taxes and, the code supervisor said, is not yet in foreclosure.
Two residents questioned the hearing. A man who gave his name only as Andy wanted to know whether the town would end up owning a large and presumably valuable piece of land; it will not — the town demolishes, the cost rides the tax roll, and whoever eventually buys the parcel buys the bill with it. Don Smith[*] of North Long Street[*] asked the harder set: was the deed pulled, who was the last deed holder, was it a person or a corporation, did the property carry a house-of-worship tax abatement, will the town place a lien, and does demolishing a building full of asbestos require a special permit and a specially qualified crew. It does, the code supervisor answered — a demolition permit, an asbestos testing-and-abatement checklist, the whole sequence. The town orders the work and then holds the winning bidder to the same rules as everyone else. “Even though it's, you know, the town ordering it, we would still follow through with those complete steps.”
The board closed the hearing, voted the environmental determination, and voted the resolution — 2026-724[*] — both on collective voice votes, in under forty seconds. No member's individual position was recorded. The Supervisor's one condition was not written into the motion but said out loud: the neighbors on Dodge Road have been patient for years, and they are to be told the timeline. Next comes competitive bidding. “If we were able to get it down this year, we would like to do that.”
“Billed to the owner” sounds like an invoice. It isn't. When a town demolishes a structure under a code order, the cost is levied against the parcel — added to the property's tax bill, where it sits as a charge the land carries. Nobody writes the town a cheque. If the owner never surfaces, the money is recovered only when the parcel finally changes hands, most likely through an Erie County tax foreclosure, and the buyer takes it as is: back taxes, demolition cost and all. In the meantime the Town of Amherst fronts the money. That is the real trade the board made Monday — public money now against a recovery later that depends entirely on someone wanting 3.34 acres on Dodge Road.
Jane Cox[*] of Harlem Road came with a resolution number and a grievance. The number was 2026-747[*]; the grievance was that Amherst is preparing to hire people into civil-service jobs without making them sit the civil-service exam. She laid out the system first, patiently, the way someone does when they expect to be dismissed: tests create fair competition, the top three scorers become the pool, and local officials pick from that pool.
The program at issue, she said, is HELPS — which she expanded as “Hiring for Emergency Limited Placement.”[*] Her objection stacked up fast. Who decides whether an untested person is technically qualified? Who lets that person then be promoted through the system, with full benefits, “without having ever passed the qualifying tests as others in their jobs have had to do”? Provisional hiring already exists for genuine emergencies, she noted, and the rule is that the test is called as soon as possible — “that is the fair way and that is the way it has been past practice.” She connected it to a change the town already made: “Not only is the town now getting rid of the residency rule requirement for their choice people, but now the testing may become discretionary.” Then the line that landed: “This stinks of the friends and family program. A lot of people are aware of it.” In a town of 130,000 people, she said, Amherst should not have a recruitment problem. “I think the problem might be advertising or something else.” And a warning about the next administration, whoever it is: “If you open the door for this, you're going to have people… who will come in and try to fill those jobs untested.”
Lavin answered her directly and at more length than he gave anyone else all night. The applicant pool has collapsed, he said. When he worked in the Erie County human-resources department, police exams drew thousands and the county “never needed to get into the 85s” — it hired from scores of 90 and above. Now it is a couple of hundred, countywide. Meanwhile the work does not stop: “the water treatment plant still needs to operate.” He named the headwinds as he sees them — people unwilling to leave private-sector jobs for an employment decision made by a test score, a general reluctance to work for government, and Tier 6 of the state pension system, which he called not the best of tiers to be in. His summary was the sharpest formulation of the argument: “You might not be a great test taker, but you might be a great plant operator at our sewage plant.”
A town human-resources official then filled in the mechanics Cox had said were missing. Every title placed in HELPS goes through a county public hearing and then to the state for approval. The job specifications themselves do not change, and the same county civil-service staff who decide whether you may sit for an exam decide whether you qualify for the position. In place of the test, HELPS adds eight weeks of extra probation, during which the supervisor judges whether the employee can actually do the duties before certification. The underlying problem, the official said, is that exams have been “severely backlogged from COVID to this day” and the specs have drifted from reality — she cited a title requiring a year of CB-radio experience that no applicant could possibly obtain.
No vote on the HELPS program was taken in open session Monday. Resolution 2026-747[*] was never read aloud, never moved and never called. If the board acted on it, it did so inside the consent agenda — five Human Resources items were adopted by number, without description, in a single voice vote — or it is still to come. With no agenda posted, this publication cannot tell you which. The supervisor's tense was present and settled: “the reason we're enrolling in this program.”
New York fills most municipal jobs through competitive civil service: you sit an exam, you are ranked, and the hiring officer must choose from among the top three reachable scorers — the “rule of three.” The test is the gate, and the gate is the point: it is what keeps a public payroll from being handed out.
The state's HELPS program lets a municipality fill designated titles without that exam. What it does not do — on the account the town gave from the dais — is lower the standard for the job: the title still carries county-approved specifications, the county still judges whether a candidate meets them, and the state still signs off on the title's inclusion. The substitute for the exam is time: an extra eight weeks of probation in which a supervisor can decide the person cannot do the work.
So the honest way to read Monday's exchange is that both speakers were right about different things. The resident's objection is structural — remove the test and you remove the one part of hiring that is blind to who knows whom. The town's answer is practical — the test no longer produces applicants, and the sewage plant has to run. Nothing said Monday resolved that; the board took no vote on it in public.
Melanie Merrill[*] has lived on Chateau Terrace for more than twenty years, and she brought photographs. The subject was 22 Chateau Terrace[*] — a house she said a developer bought roughly five years ago and then simply stopped using. Nobody has lived in it. Nobody has maintained it. And it is, she told the board, a historically designated building, protected because it is architecturally significant to the neighborhood.
Her account of the construction that has since arrived around it was specific enough to check: no barrier has ever been put up around the home; construction vehicles and tools sit right against it; debris and large metal pipes are piled around it; the stucco at the foundation has cracked from the vehicles. The sidewalk alongside is cracked, broken and buckling, and in winter it is neither plowed nor maintained — which matters, she said, because the town recently moved the crosswalks so they all sit on that side of the street, and every child walking to school now walks past it. Screens are ripped. There may be broken glass. The wooden front steps are decayed.
She was direct about what she thinks is happening, and careful to frame it as her reading rather than a finding: “They're eating away at it. So eventually they can say, well, now it's derelict and it has to be destroyed” — which, she added, is what happened to the garage on the same property. “We value that home. We'd like to see it lived in with a family.”
Lavin's answer was a date. “With regard to Chateau Terrace, we have a public hearing scheduled for that on November 9th,” he said, and encouraged her to come. Earlier in the same meeting the town clerk had read, inside the consent agenda, a communication referred jointly to the town attorney and the planning department with a public hearing to be scheduled for November 9. Whether that is the same matter was not stated on the record and cannot be confirmed without an agenda. The board took no other action on the property Monday.
A note on the irony the meeting did not remark on: the board spent its first twenty minutes agreeing that a building left to rot for four years must come down, and its public-expression period listening to a resident argue that a protected building is being left to rot so that it can come down. The two items were never connected from the dais.
Steve Cohen[*] of 49 Deer Run[*] spent his first ninety seconds at the podium establishing standing, and it was a considerable amount of standing. Forty years an Amherst resident; his wife more than sixty; a volunteer with the Swormville[**] Fire Company since 1985, past treasurer and still an exempt member; committees under three town supervisors, several of which he chaired. “I've never said no to the town for anything they've asked of me.” His wife volunteered for Amherst Meals on Wheels and the library and now works there part-time; his sons went through the Amherst Youth Board and the Amherst Youth Court.
He has asked the town for something exactly twice. The first time was between 2002 and 2006, when he offered to pay out of his own pocket to put concrete stairs down into the retention pond behind his house so the neighborhood kids could skate and play hockey on it. The town said no: it holds a drainage easement there, it did not want the liability, and it would reconsider only if he carried insurance. His insurer declined on the grounds that the easement was the town's. He dropped it.
The second time is now. The pond has been eroding toward his house for years, and it is about to undermine his driveway. Town engineers, he said, have come out many times over many years and looked at it. Nothing was done. Last year he came to the board and was taken into executive session. “I never got an official answer,” he said, “but I assume that the answer was no.”
He got three contractor proposals: $65,000, $216,000, and $440,000 — the last, he noted, “more than we paid for our house.” Town Attorney Steve Bengart, he said, told him plainly to mitigate his damages and get it fixed. So he did, at his own expense, and part of what his contractor had to repair was not even his: the headwall next to the culvert pipe, which is town property, had been eaten away too. He asked the board to contribute $75,000, left an engineer's report in manila folders on the dais, and said he and his wife would like to retire next year and that the cost of this is painful.
The supervisor's response round that followed covered Jane Cox, the veterans exemption, Chateau Terrace and Don Smith. It did not mention Steve Cohen, the retention pond, the headwall or the $75,000. Nothing on the record indicates the request was refused. Nothing on the record indicates it was acknowledged either.
Six residents signed up or stood up to speak Monday — and possibly a seventh, since the man who gave only the first name Andy at the demolition hearing may have been the Andy who spoke later under public expression. Public expression was never formally opened by motion; the supervisor simply announced the item and started down the sign-up sheet. It was closed by motion.
The veterans exemption. Andy Skabinsky[*] introduced himself as a 100% disabled American veteran, permanent, and asked a question the town has not answered publicly: will Amherst opt into New York's new 100% veterans exemption? He has been to the assessor's office four times, he said, and “never got the same answer twice,” though by the end they had it more or less nailed down. A congressional district office up the street did not know either. His diagnosis was procedural: “The problem is the law got passed and then the budget made it different” — leaving every municipality and school district to opt in separately. He offered his credentials for persistence: 32 days picketing outside the Buffalo VA in 2018, and a regional director who was eventually walked out of the building. He named two congressional offices — those of Rep. Tim Kennedy[*] and Rep. Nick Langworthy[*] — as the entities that got that done, and named the staffers in each; this brief does not print the staffers' names, which exist only in audio and belong to people incidental to the story. “So I'm just wondering what Amherst is going to do for us veterans.” Lavin, who said he is a veteran himself and has served as a director of veterans' affairs, replied that the town is evaluating the exemption with its assessor “to see what kind of appetite the town has collectively.” No date, no resolution, no commitment.
The greenway. Thomas Frank[*] opened public expression with a dense and discursive argument for treating Ellicott Creek as a piece of a much larger system. He tied together a U.S. Geological Survey joint funding agreement for stream telemetry on the creek (he read a number the audio renders as “CRS 6459”[*]), the Village of Williamsville's walkable-village grant, a Central Park greenway he described as a 34-mile section of the Niagara River Greenway, and the $450 million[*] allocated to mitigate the cumulative impact of the power project on the watershed. He pointed to the Genesee Valley Greenway as a model and an $8.2 million[*] Rochester award as proof of concept, argued for interconnecting Glen Park with Amherst State Park as an environmental conservation and education center, noted that the Western New York Regional Economic Development Council met the following day, and left the board an overview running to 2050 that he said involves ten intermunicipal agencies. He also wanted the board to know they were sitting on former French territory. Lavin, who let him run past the light, was fond about it: “I always like how you come in, Tom.” Then, gently: “Tom, it's Jane's turn to speak.” None of it produced an action item.
The park that is not the playground you are thinking of. Returning from the floor after the sign-up list ran out, Don Smith[*] asked about Resolution 2026-725[*], passed without discussion eighteen minutes earlier: roughly eight acres, he said, broken off a twenty-acre piece of Amherst Central Park,[*] improved on the town's dollar, and then — he asked — sold to Erie County for a dollar, the way he understood the Willowdale arrangement to work? Town-owned or county-owned at the end of it? Lavin confirmed the general shape without confirming the mechanism: “We have several millions of dollars that were given to us via grant for the North Forest Road playground.” Done, he hoped, by the fall of 2027 — “an amazing place for kids and families” — and after that, “maybe the year after, then it's a county park in its entirety.” This is not the Kingsgate Park playground this publication has been following since August, and the two should not be run together: different park, different money, different timeline. The August 31 brief reported a $500,000 state grant for Kingsgate with community design input beginning in October. That project was not mentioned Monday at all.
Councilmember Michael Szukala had asked that one item be pulled out of the consent agenda and held to the end, and it turned out to be the night's only piece of self-examination. Communication 2026-763[*] carried the Board of Ethics' report on the more than 200 ethics disclosures town employees file every year to surface conflicts of interest.
The headline finding was clean: “There were no conflicts of interest for the forms that we had a chance to examine.” But the Board of Ethics, Szukala said, went further and found the process itself wanting. Amherst uses two disclosure forms, a short one and a long one, and over the past few years the board has found employees filing the short form when they should have filed the long one, and employees filing the long form when the short one would have done. Worse, some of the questions simply “don't address some of the problems that we have at the town to reveal conflicts of interest.”
So the Board of Ethics drafted a replacement. It reviewed the county's disclosure form, the state's, and several others, took what it judged the best questions from each, and produced a single consolidated form — printed at the back of the board's packet — that it proposes should replace both existing ones. “It is my hope that the community and the board will consider this,” Szukala said.
What happened next is the part worth reading slowly. Lavin recommended the communication be received and filed, and asked whether there were objections. Szukala added that he would like it also referred to the town attorney, “for review of the draft that they put forward so we can work on it for 2027.” Lavin put that to the room the same way. “Any objections to that from the board?” “None.” And that was the disposition: received, filed, referred to counsel, and aimed at 2027. The new ethics form was not adopted. Amherst still has two forms.
Three different things happened on this item, and only one of them has legal weight.
Received and filed means the board has formally acknowledged a document exists and placed it in the town's records. It changes nothing. It commits the board to nothing. It is the municipal equivalent of “noted, thank you.”
Referred to the town attorney sends the draft out for legal review. Also not an adoption — it is the step before anyone decides whether to adopt.
Unanimous consent is how both were done. Nobody moved anything, nobody seconded anything, and no vote was taken. The chair asked whether there were objections, heard none, and declared the disposition. That is a legitimate way for a board to handle a non-controversial item, and it is invisible in a vote tally because there is no tally to see.
So: a proposal to replace the forms that surface conflicts of interest among Amherst's employees now sits with the town attorney, with 2027 named as the target. A reader who saw only a headline could be forgiven for thinking the town changed its ethics disclosure Monday night. It did not.
The board suspended its regular order for one late item: the University at Buffalo's annual homecoming carnival, on September 25, ends with a five-minute fireworks display, and UB asked the town to close the stretch of Frontier Road between John James Audubon Parkway and St. Ritas Lane from 6 p.m. to about 11 p.m. The request arrived September 10 — one day after the agenda deadline, and with the next regular meeting falling after the event. Hence the suspension. It carried on a voice vote. One oddity worth recording: the resolution as read concerns a road closure for a carnival and fireworks, but the supervisor called the vote on “the UB bike path road closure request,” a description nothing else in the reading supports. Without an agenda there is no way to reconcile the two.
Lavin also announced something new. On October 1 at 12 p.m., the town will hold a session he described as a public meeting that should be understood as a work session: no public expression, but department heads invited to present the positions and projects they are requesting in the 2027 budget[*] and to be questioned by the board. It is the first time Amherst has done this. “So forgive us as we get the wrinkles out.” Residents may attend.
The consent agenda itself was notably lighter than the last one. The town clerk read 44 items across thirteen department headings, plus five communications and three public-improvement permits, and the board adopted the whole thing in one voice vote. Two weeks earlier the same exercise ran to roughly seventy-five items. The town attorney's block in particular went from ten items on August 31 — a concentration Don Smith complained about from the podium that night, asking whether placing them there made them all subject to attorney-client privilege — to four. Whether that is a response or a coincidence cannot be determined from the record.
The evening opened with a memorial. A councilmember whose name is not captured on the recording honored Don Daigler,[*] a member of the Swormville[**] Fire Company for more than 65 years who served it as chief, president, vice president, captain and chief mechanic, and who served as a U.S. Army tank gunner in the Korean War. Lavin gave the invocation himself, on the Friday-past 25th anniversary of September 11, and used it to credit the town's 9/11 Commemoration Committee for its ceremony — the one Deputy Supervisor Angela Marinucci had announced from this dais two weeks earlier. It is the only August commitment that visibly came due. Marinucci announced the town's Harvest Fest[*] at Bassett Park on September 26, with the Arts and Culture in Public Places Board running a children's decorating activity; Szukala marked National Fire Prevention Week, October 4–10.
Items this publication reported as live and unresolved, and what happened to them Monday:
One more August thread closed sideways. On August 31 this publication could identify the town attorney only by office, because the dais addressed him as “Steve” and the Town's own August 10 packet spells his first name two different ways. Monday a resident named him aloud from the podium — “Town attorney Steve Bengart was very generous with his advice” — which corroborates the surname and the short form, and does precisely nothing to settle whether it is Steven or Stephen. Audio cannot hear a spelling.
Not one roll-call vote was taken at this meeting. Every action below — the demolition of two buildings, the environmental determination that preceded it, a second resolution, a 44-item consent agenda, a road closure and the adjournment — carried on a collective voice vote: the chair says “all those in favor,” the room says “aye,” and no individual position is recorded. Twelve such votes were taken. Every row below therefore reads “Approved (voice).” That does not mean unanimous, and this brief does not claim it. What the recording supports is narrower and worth stating exactly: no audible “no” was cast on any item, no one called for a division, and no recusal or abstention was announced at any point. Compare August 31, when the same board put each of five bond resolutions to a name-by-name poll. Borrowing money is the category of action where this board reaches for a roll call; ordering two buildings destroyed, evidently, is not.
Two further distinctions matter for reading the rows. The consent agenda is a bundle: 44 items read out by department and number, none described, adopted in a single five-second vote. Its contents cannot be verified without the agenda, and anything the board did there is invisible here. And the Board of Ethics item was not voted on at all — it was disposed of by unanimous consent, the chair asking for objections and hearing none, which produces no motion, no second and no tally. Its row is marked accordingly.
Finally, the attendance roll. The town clerk called five names and the recording captures four “present” responses; Councilmember Szukala's is not audible before the next name is called. He demonstrably participated — he gave an announcement and led the ethics discussion. The same gap appeared in the August 31 roll, which suggests a microphone, not an absence.
Five-member board (Supervisor Shawn Lavin, Deputy Supervisor Angela Marinucci, Councilmembers John B. Davis, Jack Kavanaugh and Michael Szukala). No roll call was taken on any action. Every item carried on a collective “all those in favor”; no individual positions are recorded, no audible dissent was cast, and no recusal or abstention 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.
Authorizes the Town of Amherst to demolish both structures at 790 Dodge Road after a public hearing at which two residents asked questions and nobody opposed the demolition itself. Moved by the supervisor immediately after the environmental determination, seconded, carried on “all those in favor” with no audible dissent. No roll call was taken and no individual position is recorded. Demolition cost will be levied against the parcel. The owner is unknown to the town; the parcel is a little over $23,000 in arrears and, per the code-enforcement supervisor, not yet in foreclosure. Next step is competitive bidding.
New York requires a board to make its environmental finding before it approves an action, not after — which is why a single demolition needed two motions. The supervisor moved the determination first, then the resolution “with the approved SEQR.” Both carried on collective voice votes. The finding itself was not described on the record; the audio renders the acronym as “seeker” throughout.
Described from the dais as a recommendation of the town to approve the facility improvement plan for an application on a property the supervisor began to read as “seven fifty north—” before the street name is lost. This brief does not complete that address. The supervisor added that it was “just a review action” with no public hearing attached; it was moved, seconded and carried with no discussion in roughly seven seconds. A resident later characterized the item as involving roughly eight acres broken off a twenty-acre piece of Amherst Central Park[*], and the supervisor's reply discussed grant-funded improvements to a North Forest Road playground that would eventually become a county park — but neither statement was tied to the resolution on the record.
Read aloud by the town clerk as headings and item numbers only, with nothing described: town attorney 1–4; town clerk 1–3; building maintenance 1; controller 1; contract compliance 1–3; court 1; emergency services 1; engineering 1–3; highway 1–3; human resources 1–5; planning 1–3; police 1–4; sewer (district 16)[*] 1–4. Five communications: the first referred to the town attorney and planning with a public hearing to be scheduled for November 9, the remaining four referred to the town attorney. Three public-improvement permits, all consent. Adopted in a single collective voice vote of roughly five seconds. Contents are not verifiable without the agenda — including whether Resolution 2026-747, the HELPS program a resident spoke against, was among the five human-resources items.
No vote was taken on this item. Held out of the consent agenda at Councilmember Szukala's request. He reported that the Board of Ethics examined the more than 200 disclosures town employees file annually and found no conflicts of interest among the forms it reviewed, but identified structural problems — two separate forms frequently filed in error, and questions that miss the conflicts the town actually needs surfaced. The board proposes one consolidated form, drawn from county, state and other models, printed at the back of the packet. The supervisor recommended the communication be received and filed and asked for objections; Szukala asked that it also be referred to the town attorney for review with a view to 2027; the supervisor asked again for objections and was answered “none.” Disposed of by unanimous consent: no motion, no second, no tally. The proposed form was not adopted.
Moved by the supervisor so the board could take a single suspension item that had missed the agenda deadline. Seconded, carried on a collective voice vote; no roll call.
Read by a councilmember whose name is not captured on the recording. Authorizes closure of the section of Frontier Road between John James Audubon Parkway and St. Ritas Lane from 6 p.m. until approximately 11 p.m. on September 25, 2026, to accommodate the five-minute fireworks display that ends the University at Buffalo's annual homecoming carnival at its Amherst campus. The resolution recites that UB's request was not received until September 10 — one day past the agenda deadline — and that the next regular meeting falls after the event. Moved, seconded, carried on a voice vote. The supervisor called the vote on “the UB bike path road closure request,” a description the reading does not otherwise support.
Moved by the supervisor after the suspension item; seconded and carried on a voice vote.
Moved immediately after the attendance roll, seconded, carried on “all those in favor” with no audible dissent. The minutes were not read. Their approval means the official record of the August 31 meeting — including the five bond resolutions and their roll calls — now exists in final form and can be checked against this publication's August 31 brief.
The night's only public hearing. Moved by the supervisor, seconded, carried on a voice vote. The supervisor noted there were no councilmember resolutions on the agenda this evening.
Closed after the supervisor invited further questions from the audience and got none. The hearing ran about seventeen minutes: a staff presentation with photographs, four board questions, and two residents.
No motion to open public expression appears on the recording — the supervisor announced the item and began calling the sign-up sheet from the top. The close was moved, seconded and carried on a voice vote. Amherst holds a single public-expression period; a speaker used part of her time to ask again for a second one, a request first reported here in August and still unanswered.
Moved by the supervisor at approximately 51 minutes 43 seconds, after announcing the October 1 budget session; seconded and carried on a voice vote. No executive session was announced on the record.
No agenda was available for this meeting, and the mandatory agenda cross-check could not be run for a single item in this brief. The Town of Amherst has posted no agenda packet for either September 14, 2026 Town Board session — the 4:00 p.m. work session or the 7:00 p.m. regular meeting — and the Town's IQM2 portal lists both as carrying no documents. The most recent Amherst Town Board agenda in this publication's files remains August 10. The cross-check that normally verifies applicant names, entity names, project titles, addresses, dollar figures and resolution numbers against the official docket therefore did not happen. Everything above rests on machine transcription of the meeting audio. Proper nouns are flagged [*] far more liberally than usual as a result, and every name, figure and resolution number in this brief 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 here — note that the numbers heard Monday (2026-724, 2026-725, 2026-747, communication 2026-763) sit roughly eighty above the 642–647 range heard two weeks earlier, a jump this publication cannot explain or confirm. Amherst is simply slow to post; the same gap occurred for August 31, and that brief was partially repaired later from the August 10 packet. This one may be too.
What is verified, and is stated without flags. The Town Board roster: Supervisor Shawn Lavin, Deputy Supervisor Angela Marinucci, and Councilmembers Michael Szukala, John B. Davis and Jack Kavanaugh — verified 2026-06-17, re-confirmed against the official June 8 minutes, and the Deputy Supervisor designation confirmed twice over by the August 10 packet's roll-call table and the August 31 roll call. Audio renders them as Levin, Zucalla and Zukawa; those are corrected silently and carry no flag. From the same August 10 packet, in print: the Town Clerk is Francina J. Spoth (she called Monday's roll and read the consent agenda; the identification here is by office, not by voice) and the Town Attorney is Steven B. Bengart, named aloud Monday by a resident as “Steve Bengart,” which corroborates the surname but cannot settle the Town's own inconsistency between “Steven” and “Stephen.” Also print-confirmed and unflagged: the Arts and Culture in Public Places Board (rendered by the audio as “the Amherst Hudson cultural in public places committee”), John James Audubon Parkway, and the Town Board's status as the governing body for the hamlets.
Street validation. Run against the town's 1,347-street official index. Eight candidate references were extracted; six matched exactly — Chateau Terrace, Deer Run, Dodge Road, Frontier Road, Harlem Road, North Forest Road — with no “suggest” or “ambiguous” results. Two came back unknown and were resolved by hand: “JJ Audubon Parkway” is an abbreviation of John James Audubon Parkway, which is on the index and print-confirmed in the August 10 packet; “Amherst Youth Court” is not a street at all but a town youth program, and the extractor caught it on the word “Court.” Three more were validated by a manual pass because they were spoken without a street-type word or with punctuation the extractor could not parse: “St. Rita's Lane” is St Ritas Lane on the index; “North Long” is North Long Street, as on August 31; and “22 Chateau” is rendered here as 22 Chateau Terrace because the speaker separately named Chateau Terrace — but the index carries four Chateau streets (Terrace, Ter E, Ter N, Ter S), so that house number is not fully pinned and is flagged. “Ellicott Creek” was left as the creek and not mangled into Ellicott Creek Road. “Bassett Park” is reported as spoken; the index carries Bassett Road.
Other applied corrections. “Seeker” to SEQR. “Swarmville” to Swormville[**], a documented Amherst-area hamlet. “Harvest fast” to Harvest Fest. “The 2020 budget” to the 2027 budget, which the context makes unambiguous. “Sewer plant sixteen” is reported as sewer district 16 and flagged. “Mark Burke” is rendered Mark Berke per this publication's corrections file, which records him as Commissioner of Buildings — but from research, not from a Town-issued document, so it stays flagged. One transcription artifact was paraphrased rather than quoted: the audio has the supervisor saying he has “fought veterans,” which is plainly a dropped preposition in a sentence about advocating for them.
What we would not print. Several people are described by role because their names could not be rendered responsibly, and inventing a plausible spelling would be fabrication. The town's code-enforcement supervisor, who presented the entire demolition case, gave his name as “Bill” followed by a surname the audio renders as an unrecoverable fragment; he is identified by first name and role only, as the dais addressed him. The councilmember who delivered the opening memorial is not named — the introduction cuts off before the name. The board's fire liaison, who urged speed on the demolition, self-identified by role and is given that way. The councilmember who asked whether the owner would be billed, and the councilmember who read the UB road-closure resolution, are likewise not identifiable from the recording. The town human-resources official who explained the HELPS mechanics is unnamed; the supervisor separately referred to “our HR director,” but the recording does not establish that they are the same person. Two congressional district-office staffers named by a speaker are omitted: they are private individuals incidental to the story, and their names exist only in audio. The congresswoman's office “up the street” is unnamed because the speaker did not name it. The USGS agreement number a speaker read aloud is reported as heard and flagged. And the address in Resolution 2026-725 is left incomplete: the supervisor began “seven fifty north—” and the street name is not on the recording. The surrounding discussion concerned North Forest Road, but this brief will not finish a street name the record does not contain.
Address cross-reference. Both specific properties at issue were checked against this publication's scanner entity database, with attention to the municipality column. 790 Dodge Road has no record — no dispatch mentions since May 2026. That neither confirms nor contradicts the 34 police calls described from the dais, which are the Building Department's account of the Amherst Police Department's own records, not scanner traffic; nothing about the property is in the story from that source. 22 Chateau Terrace has no record either. The nearest entries are 25 Chateau Terrace (Amherst) and 47 Chateau Terrace (Snyder) — different houses — and several “Chateau Court” addresses in Depew, a different municipality entirely, which were excluded. Neither property carries a dispatch pattern a reader needs, so neither appears in the story.
What is missing. The board's 4:00 p.m. work session the same day was not captured and is not reflected here; per house policy a work session is folded into the parent board's brief rather than published separately, and there was nothing to fold. The board's disposition of Resolution 2026-747, the HELPS program, is not observable: it was never read aloud, and if it was acted on it was inside the consent agenda. The [*] convention is explained in Sources; [**] marks a place-name corrected to a documented Amherst-area hamlet.