Town of Amherst Town Board
Amherst's proposed 2027 budget raises the tax levy 6.91 percent — $7.3 million — and the supervisor told a hostile room the increase buys nothing new: road salt at $93 a ton, a refuse contract up nearly $2 million, diesel at a record. The same night it enacted a 2.5 percent hotel tax projected to yield $2.8 million.
Four residents came to the microphone on Tuesday night to talk about the 2027 Amherst budget, and not one of them disputed that costs have risen. What they disputed was whether that is the whole answer. “Inflation didn't approve these projects,” the first of them said. “Inflation didn't authorize the borrowing, and inflation didn't decide where taxpayer dollars would be spent. Elected officials did.”
The numbers before the board were these. Appropriations of $188 million against estimated revenues of $66 million, with $7.6 million of fund balance appropriated to close the gap. What remains is the tax levy: $113 million, against $106 million last year. The difference is $7.3 million, or 6.91 percent.
Supervisor Shawn A. Lavin[*] presented it himself, and his case was that essentially none of it is discretionary. He walked through the drivers line by line — the refuse contract, sludge haulage, road salt, treatment chemicals, fuel, electricity, sewer-line repair, truck repair on an ageing fleet, then health insurance, pension contributions, retiree health and social security — and totalled them: $6.8 million of the $7.3 million increase. “Every single one of these,” he said, “I would argue are absolute necessities to make this town run.”
Then the line that frames the whole evening: “I unfortunately wish I could stand here and tell you we are instead getting a new fleet of snow plows. We're not. We are just paying for the basics here. And that's a hard position to be in.”
The room was not persuaded. John Klein[*] of Eagle Street gave the sharpest version of it, and gave his age as part of the argument. “I am 29 years old, just bought a house, trying to make a living and trying to grow a family. And I can barely afford to get by.” His objection was not to the cost of salt but to a specific transaction: the town bought a property for $7.75 million and conveyed it onward for a dollar. “Why are we raising taxes if we're increasing taxes, but we're making monetary decisions that make no financial sense?” He put the figure at an 11 percent increase last year followed by this one. “This is absurd. Absolutely absurd.” The applause that followed drew a reminder from the chair that the rules of decorum do not allow clapping.
A resident of North Forest Road, who did not give her name, returned twice to the same property — the former Westwood Country Club, now becoming Willowdale Park — and to a question she said she had asked repeatedly without an answer. For years, hundreds of cars from car dealerships were parked on that land. “What happened to those revenues? Who earned those revenues?” She also raised compounding: an increase of roughly 11 percent, then 6.9 on top of it, against homes reassessed recently and a further reassessment she had read was coming in spring 2027. “It feels like a betrayal when we are all trying to kind of get by and live a clean and healthy life here in this suburban town.”
Lavin's answers were specific, which is the reason to report them. The 11.4 percent increase was three years ago, he said, followed by roughly half a percent and then zero. Cumulative inflation since 2020 is about 30 percent — “a dollar in 2020 is 77 cents today.” On reassessment, his experience is that “a third go up, a third go down, and a third stay neutral,” not that every house rises. On the parking revenue: “You're absolutely right. We did lose that as a revenue stream” — and he defended the trade, because there are no county parks in the Town of Amherst and the town is the largest share of the county outside Buffalo. Willowdale is 130 acres that “will be green for generations. It's something I would do again.”
On wages, which the evening's most numerate speaker had identified as eight of the twelve million dollars of total change, Lavin did not retreat either. “Nobody's going to be a lifeguard in Amherst for twelve bucks an hour when you can make eighteen at Target.” The people in question, he said, are the ones “who get up at four in the morning, who have a CDL and plow the streets before you even get out of bed.”
Councilmember John Davis[*] supplied the one piece of new information on the parking question, and it is a strange and vivid piece. He had chased the money down himself last year. Yes, the town received it. Most of it went straight back into the vacant Westwood clubhouse — which has electricity, because it has a sophisticated alarm system to keep people out; water, to keep the building from deteriorating; and heat, for the same reason. He has toured it three times. The central core is stone twelve inches thick and “isn't going anywhere.” The later additions, “especially the ladies locker room, it's degenerated badly.” There are holes in the roof.
No vote was taken. The hearing was adjourned; the budget returns on October 26, alongside the levy-override resolution the supervisor confirmed has cleared and will come to its own public hearing that night.
One councilmember put the increase in household terms rather than percentages: 6.9 percent “equates to about an extra ten dollars a month to ensure we have trash picked up, to ensure we're a first-world society with clean water.” He called it “the toughest decision I'm going to have to make.”
The figure is worth holding next to the levy. $7.3 million spread across the town's taxable parcels is the arithmetic behind “ten dollars a month” — an average, not a bill. A home reassessed upward, as several speakers said theirs had been, pays more than the average. The town has a further reassessment indicated for spring 2027.
Three categories account for $6.8 million of the increase, and the supervisor's presentation named figures for each. They are worth setting out, because this is the part of a budget hearing that usually passes in a blur of slides.
Solid waste and recycling: +$1.4 million. The town's contract with Modern expires at the end of this year. It went to bid in the spring, and took the lowest bidder. Even so, Lavin said, the increase is “almost $2 million for paying more this year than we did last year for the exact same thing.” Councilmember Michael Szukala[*] sat on the RFP committee.
Road salt: from $43 a ton to $93. The town paid $43 in 2025, $57 in 2026, and will pay $93 a ton in 2027 — a figure that more than doubles in two years. Amherst uses roughly 16,000 tons a year depending on the winter.
Fuel, chemicals and power. Gas and oil up almost $600,000, with diesel “the highest it has ever been.” Treatment chemicals up $168,000. Sludge haulage from the wastewater plant up $246,000. And a detail that says most about where a town's money actually goes: Amherst is using less electricity in some facilities than last year and still paying 20 percent more for it. The wastewater treatment plant alone drew about 13 million kilowatt hours last year.
Employee benefits: $2.26 million across four lines. Health insurance $845,000; retirement $821,000; retiree health $316,000; social security $280,000. On the pension line Lavin made a point most budget presentations skip: employees contribute to pensionable earnings through payroll, and the town pays double what the employee pays.
Against these sit two fixed-asset items: $750,000 set aside in advance as the capital share of the new occupancy tax, and $83,000 of CHIPS money from the state.
A reader could reasonably ask why a board that finds a cost unaffordable does not refuse to pay it. The answer is in the composition of the list.
Snow and ice control, drinking water, wastewater treatment and police response are not programmes a New York town elects to offer; they are functions it is obliged to perform, several of them under state permit or mandate. A wastewater plant has a discharge permit with numbers in it, and the chemicals and electricity that meet those numbers are not a line a board can zero out.
The same is true of most of the benefits column. Health insurance and retiree health flow from collective agreements already signed. Pension contributions are set by the New York State and Local Retirement System, not by Amherst — the town is billed a rate it does not negotiate.
What remains genuinely discretionary in a town budget is a far thinner slice than the headline suggests, which is precisely why the speakers aimed at past decisions rather than this year's line items. Debt service on a choice made five years ago is as unavoidable, today, as road salt.
The only thing the board actually enacted on Tuesday was a new tax, and it will be paid almost entirely by people who do not live in Amherst.
Liz Berkowski[*], the town's Director of Special Projects, presented the case with numbers from Smith Travel Research and Visit Buffalo Niagara. Amherst has 3,932 hotel rooms available every night — 1.4 million room-nights a year — running at 60.5 percent average occupancy, which sells about 870,000 room-nights annually. At an average daily rate of $130, that is over $112 million a year in the local economy. Sports tourism alone accounts for roughly 130,000 room-nights and $98 million of economic impact.
The instrument is a 2.5 percent tax on any paid overnight stay of less than 30 nights — hotels, extended stay, bed and breakfasts, and short-term rentals including Airbnb and Vrbo. Projected revenue is more than $2.8 million a year: $700,000 ring-fenced for capital improvements and $2.1 million available for any lawful town purpose, which is to say the general fund the budget hearing had just finished discussing.
Amherst will be the cheapest such tax in its neighbourhood. Erie County charges 3 to 5 percent depending on hotel size; Cheektowaga 3; the City of Buffalo 3; Lancaster 3 as of this year; Niagara Falls 6.
Two things about the design are worth drawing out. The first is the ring-fence. No money reached the North Town Center in this year's capital program — water and sewer came first — and the arena is in its 25th year, competing against a brand-new ice centre in Utica and two four-sheet facilities in Rochester that are newly remodelled or being remodelled now. The occupancy tax mandates reinvestment instead of leaving it to each year's budget fight. Lavin was explicit about liking that: “I like that it ties the hands of future leadership that they have to reinvest in our community assets.”
The second is that it expires. The state authorisation runs for three years only, the town attorney told the board — so in about two and a half years Amherst must return to the legislature, obtain reauthorisation, have the governor sign again, and re-adopt its own law. “It is not permanent.”
The board amended the law before passing it. Section 175-76 was revised to require quarterly rather than monthly reporting and payment, together, no later than ten days after the start of each calendar quarter. Section 175-74 gained a definition of short-term rental: “furnished lodging rented for less than 30 days at a time, usually reserved through an online marketplace.” Both amendments carried, and Resolution 2026-776 then passed as amended. The requested effective date is January 1.
One ambition did not survive the budget. A councilmember said she had pushed to dedicate a small portion to public art and outside cultures, and that it “just didn't really make any sense to go that way” this year. “It is one of the hard decisions we made.”
The most quietly consequential sentence in the presentation was an admission. “Right now we have a little bit of a data vacuum when it comes to short-term rentals. We don't really know exactly how many Airbnbs and Vrbos are out there. We think it's somewhere between 350 and 400, but we don't have an exact number.”
The law's fix is administrative rather than punitive: a certificate of registration with the town clerk becomes a precondition of a certificate of occupancy, and the town intends to work directly with Airbnb and Vrbo, which already collect and remit such taxes on hosts' behalf elsewhere.
A town that cannot count its short-term rentals also cannot inspect them, zone them, or answer a neighbour's complaint about one. The revenue is the stated purpose of this law; a register may prove the more durable result.
The town owns a 1959 church. It would like to stop. Lori Stilwell[*], Community Development Director, asked the board to rezone the former Eggertsville Community Center[*] at 4110 Bailey Avenue, on the corner of Bailey and Oxford, from Community Facilities District to General Business so that it can be sold and reused.
The particulars: a single main structure of about 12,800 square feet, built as a church in 1959, with an adjoining side lot, on 1.2 acres with 450 feet of frontage. The building is vacant. Two new community centres will serve the greater Eggertsville area within a few years, and this site — landlocked, ageing, with no room to co-locate the playgrounds and green space the town now builds alongside its community centres — no longer fits the purpose. Community Facilities zoning permits little beyond governmental and quasi-public use, which would strand it. The comprehensive plan recommends commercial mixed use for the parcel, and the properties north along Bailey are already General Business.
The sharpest exchange came from a resident the audio renders as Don Smith[*], who read the site's history as an argument against the zoning. “It was heavily slanted toward residential usage in the sense it's the church and then a community center… Everything seems to scream when you look at this property, residential.” If the town changes it, he said, “you better change it and make it so it fits with some harmony in that particular neighborhood.”
He has a partial answer already, and it came from the Amherst Planning Board, which recommended approval on August 20 but asked the town board to attach a restrictive covenant barring a list of otherwise-permitted General Business uses. The list was read into the record: ambulance service, public works construction yard, farm and garden supply, farm equipment sales and service, hotel or motel, laundromat and dry cleaning, nurseries, restaurant with drive-through, sexually oriented businesses, vehicle sales, repair, rental and lease, cannabis dispensary, and liquor store. Deputy Supervisor Angela Marinucci added that an RFP is not a bid sale: there will be a scoring matrix and a review committee, and the town reserves the right to reject every proposal.
Jane Cox[*] of Harlem Road asked the question that turned out to have the cleanest answer: does the town still owe money on it? It does not. The town acquired the property in the early 2000s and carries zero debt on it — but has borne every roof, HVAC and fire-door cost for some 26 years. Proceeds of a sale would first repay a special “distress trust” account used for distressed properties, with the remainder going to the general fund.
A resident raised the obvious objection to one likely buyer: a religious organisation pays no property tax. Lavin accepted it and reframed it. “You're absolutely right. We're not going to get a tax revenue from it. But guess what? We're also not putting in the manpower and the resources to maintain it, which is expensive year over year.” There has been interest, Stilwell said, from both private business and church organisations.
The hearing was closed and a decision date set for October 26. An RFP follows.
The evening opened with the capital improvement program for 2027 through 2032, and the headline figure is $21.5 million of new long-term bonding for 2027, plus about $6.8 million from grants and other sources — a little over $28 million in all. The six-year program carries 81 projects with a total bonding value of roughly $110 million.
The single largest driver is the water pollution control facility, and the reason is its age. It came online in 1980 and has run continuously for 46 years, treating 9 to 11 billion gallons a year. Town engineer Jeff Burrows[*] had told the board at an October 1 session that water-line costs have tripled since 2022.
Below that: paving, transportation and highway vehicles; sanitary sewer at $2.5 million; storm drainage at $400,000; lighting at $200,000; and recreation and parks at $790,000 — which, Lavin noted, is almost entirely grant-funded with no bonding attached, covering a million-dollar Briarhurst[*] grant, a Royal Park pickleball court, youth and recreation equipment, and a Kingsgate Park playground renovation.
Two residents used the hearing to ask about debt rather than projects. One put the town's long-term bonded debt at about $192 million from memory of the financial report, and asked what percentage is retired each year against what percentage is added — “I'll figure it out myself when I get home, probably.” With interest rates drifting up, he argued, borrowing gets dearer and the town should “think a little closer about what we need versus what we want.”
Lavin agreed with the framing and answered with the list: a million dollars for paving, a million for highway vehicles, $1.5 million for town-wide roofing, money to replace the salt barns, a roof at the wastewater plant. “Over and over, this CIP committee worked very hard to whittle down the bare essentials.” He then said the harder thing out loud: with rising rates, next year's capital program will be worse, and that makes the coming budget cycle “that much more challenging.”
The town attorney offered a clarification that belongs in every capital-program story. Adopting a CIP does not authorise the borrowing. Each bond returns as its own resolution with a map, plan and report explaining what the money is for, “often with a public hearing” — and one such bond, for the BCD urban renewal plan[*], was on that same evening's agenda. The CIP is a statement of intent; the borrowing is a separate decision each time.
The hearing was adjourned, to be taken up again on the 23rd.
The evening's most pointed critique was delivered at the capital-program hearing by a resident of Getzville, and it was about the budget — the next item. She had the wrong hearing, realised it mid-answer, and declined the offer to repeat herself later: “I don't need to take up your time.” She also asked to be struck from the public-expression list.
So the sharpest statement of the case against the levy was made once, at the wrong moment, and never entered the hearing it was written for. This publication reports it under the budget above, where its author intended it.
Her name is rendered on this recording as “Andrew Morganti,” which the chair's own form of address contradicts. It is not printed here.
Public expression produced the most serious allegation of the night, and it concerns a resolution the board passed eight months ago about a card game.
Don Steinholt[*], an Amherst resident and member of the euchre club at the senior centre, told the board that Resolution 2026-142, banning low-stakes gambling, was “both adopted and approved” on February 2 and does not appear on the YouTube feed of that meeting. His reading of the Open Meetings Law: a board may discuss a matter in executive session but is “prohibited from taking a final binding action behind closed doors,” must return to open session to cast votes so the public can see who voted which way, and a court may nullify an action taken entirely in secret. “This resolution falls into that category.”
He was careful about his own standing. “I am not a lawyer.” He said he would send the February 2 recording and a copy of his letter to the Amherst Bee and the Buffalo News “to fact check me… I do not want to mislead the public.” He addressed the concern to the town attorney and acknowledged he might not get a reply. He also noted the stakes involved: “We pay $2 a week for such a petty issue,” while “there is still high stakes gambling going on at the Audubon golf course.”
No one on the board responded to the Open Meetings Law allegation. The supervisor's closing remarks addressed the senior centre, the levy override, the work-session audio and the Open Government Advisory Board; the February 2 resolution was not among them. This publication has not examined the February 2 recording and takes no view on the claim — but it is a specific, checkable allegation about a named resolution, made on the record, and it is now unanswered on the record.
Mr. Steinholt's summary is substantially correct as a statement of New York law. A public body may enter executive session only for enumerated purposes, and may not take action there except in narrow circumstances; a vote that binds the body generally belongs in open session, where the public can observe it. A court may void action taken in violation, though it is not obliged to and often declines where the violation is technical.
What this publication cannot say from the record it holds is whether that is what happened on February 2. A resolution absent from a video feed may have been passed in closed session; it may equally have been passed in open session that the recording failed to capture, or carried on a consent agenda read only by number. This brief has reported an allegation, not a finding. The town's own minutes of February 2 would settle it, and obtaining them is now on this publication's list.
Buried in the consent agenda was Resolution 2026-783, repealing the town's Open Government Advisory Board, and two residents rose to defend it.
Jane Cox was blunt: “I am totally against repealing the town's open government advisory board. This was a very important committee and it became inactive when it did not have new members appointed to it.” It was set up, she said, by attorney Paul Wolf[*], who went on to form a statewide open-government group. “Please don't get rid of this committee… I think it needs to be reinstated and I think you need to put people on it.”
Don Smith made the sharper structural point, and made it about both parties. The board was created under one administration, which then “attempted to kill it after they figured out they didn't want it”; now the other party proposes to finish the job. “So now we have both parties wanting to kill the Open Government Advisory Board. That points something out to me about… why nobody who's a — I hate to use this word — politician wants to hear from.” He conceded it had died of “lack of leadership,” and that it was probably too large. But: “If you really wanted to hear from the people, that was the board to do it. There isn't much else around here that you've got that actually does that for you.”
Lavin's answer was the most candid passage of the evening, and it was not really about open government. It was about the collapse of volunteer supply. He has sent “countless emails” to local universities, community groups and student bodies; Councilmember Szukala canvasses in person. “And we just get fewer and fewer applicants… I don't even get email responses anymore when I ask people if they're interested whatsoever to serve on a board.” The shortage reaches the boards with real power: “We have trouble finding replacements for some of our bigger boards, which have real voting power like the IDA or the zoning board of appeals or the planning board.”
His framing: “It's not about killing it. This is atrophy.” Keeping an empty committee on the books is “carrying the same box of goods from one apartment to the next over and over again with nothing to show for it,” like the town's laws from the 1970s — “we haven't used leaded gasoline in decades, but it's there.”
The town attorney then supplied the procedural answer to Cox's objection that it needed no hearing: the full public hearing on rescinding the board is set for November 30, with a presentation and further comment. The repeal was not finally enacted Tuesday; the consent item moves it toward that hearing.
Everyone in the room agreed the Open Government Advisory Board stopped functioning. They disagreed about what that proves, and both readings are coherent.
The supervisor's: a committee no one will serve on is not oversight, it is paperwork. Residents say they want to be involved and then do not answer the email. Repeal is housekeeping, and the proof is that the boards with actual authority are also short of applicants.
The residents': appointments are the board's own job. A committee dies when a supervisor stops nominating to it, so “nobody applied” describes a decision as much as a condition — and the committee that happens to have withered is the one whose remit was scrutinising the administration. Cox's sentence is the whole argument: it became inactive when it did not have new members appointed to it.
Nothing on this recording resolves which it is. The November 30 hearing is where it gets argued.
An interim controller, appointed off-agenda. The board suspended its regular order to appoint Jennifer Adams[*] interim town controller, effective October 17, at an annual salary the clerk read as $155,634.88[*], per the 2026 exempt department head salary schedule at grade 1, step M. The outgoing controller, given on the recording only as Michael, had held the post about half a year and was thanked from the chair: “don't be a stranger.”
A bond, and a SEQR vote first. Resolution 2026-777, the BCD urban renewal plan bond resolution, required an environmental determination before the money could be voted. The board took that vote, then adopted the bond resolution on a roll call of the four members present. This is the mechanism the town attorney had described an hour earlier: the capital program states intent, and each bond comes back for its own decision.
Three deaths, and a retirement. The meeting opened with memorials read by Councilmember Szukala and Deputy Supervisor Marinucci. Rick Belke[*], a retired Central Fire Alarm Office dispatcher and life member of the Eggertsville Hose Company, whose colleagues called him “the very definition of the word gentleman.” Thomas P. Kenney Jr.[*] — “TK” — a Snyder Fire Department life member of more than 60 years and the only member to have held Chief of Department, President of the Fire Company and Fire District Commissioner; he retired an Amherst police detective and later investigated for the State Attorney General. And James “Flash” Marthia[*], a Town Recreation Department foreman until retirement and a Bills fan whose memorial noted he would have enjoyed the previous night's overtime win. Separately, Patrick Mayer[*] was recognised on retiring as Lieutenant of Detectives after more than 19 years with the Amherst Police Department.
The work session nobody could hear. Jane Cox reported that the afternoon's work-session video carried no audio at all on YouTube, and said she had raised it with staff. The supervisor apologised from the chair: “I do apologise for the audio issue in our work session. I don't know how that happened.” This publication can corroborate the consequence from its own side: the same-day work session was not captured for this pipeline either, and there is no transcript of it. Tuesday's evening meeting is therefore the whole of this brief's record of a day on which the board also met in the afternoon.
What comes back, and when. October 23: the capital improvement program. October 26: the 2027 budget, the levy-override hearing, and the decision date on the Bailey Avenue rezone. November 30: the hearing on rescinding the Open Government Advisory Board. January 1: the requested effective date for the occupancy tax.
Housekeeping that mattered to one resident. Cox thanked the board for publishing the corrective action plans responding to the employee-benefits and IT audits alongside the agenda, and asked again — as she has before — that the board restore the second public expression period to its rules of order. No one answered that request on the recording.
Four members sat: Supervisor Shawn A. Lavin, Deputy Supervisor Angela Marinucci, Councilmember Michael Szukala and Councilmember John Davis. Councilmember Jack Kavanaugh was absent, excused, announced from the chair before the roll. Procedural motions to open and close hearings were taken on voice votes with no tally announced; the bond resolution was the one item taken by roll call. Resolution numbers and the department-head items are from the official agenda; Town Clerk Francina J. Spoth read them aloud by department and number only. No recusal or abstention was stated. Rows 1 and 3 are the substantive hearings; row 6 is listed because it is the evening's only enacted law.
Opened and adjourned on voice votes. The supervisor presented; four residents spoke, all critically; board members asked no questions of substance beyond one statement of support. No vote on the budget was taken or scheduled for this meeting. It returns October 26, together with the public hearing on the local law overriding the state tax-cap levy limit — Resolution 2026-771, moved by Supervisor Lavin to schedule it, which the supervisor confirmed has cleared and will be noticed for that date.
The evening's first hearing. $21.5 million of long-term bonding for 2027 plus about $6.8 million from grants and other sources; the six-year program totals roughly $110 million of bonding across 81 projects. Three residents spoke. The board asked no questions. Adjourned on a voice vote and carried forward to the 23rd. The town attorney noted on the record that adopting a CIP does not authorise any borrowing — each bond returns with its own map, plan and report, often with its own public hearing.
The former Eggertsville Community Center, a 12,800-square-foot 1959 church on 1.2 acres at Bailey and Oxford, town-owned since the early 2000s with no outstanding debt. Rezoning would permit sale and reuse; the comprehensive plan recommends commercial mixed use. The Planning Board recommended approval on August 20 but asked for a restrictive covenant barring thirteen otherwise-permitted uses, read into the record. Three residents spoke; the principal objection was that the parcel sits inside a residential neighbourhood. Hearing closed and a decision date set for October 26, on a voice vote; an RFP with a scoring matrix follows, and the town reserves the right to reject all proposals.
Moved from the chair after the hearing closed, at the town attorney's suggestion. §175-76 revised so that reporting and payment occur quarterly rather than monthly, together, no later than ten days after the beginning of each calendar quarter. §175-74 revised to add a definition of short-term rental: “furnished lodging rented for less than 30 days at a time, usually reserved through online marketplace.” A member asked whether the purpose was to reduce staff workload; the question was acknowledged rather than answered. Carried on a voice vote.
The only measure enacted at this meeting. A 2.5 percent tax on paid overnight stays of less than 30 nights, covering hotels, extended stay, bed and breakfasts and short-term rentals including Airbnb and Vrbo. Projected at more than $2.8 million a year, of which $700,000 is ring-fenced for capital improvements at town facilities and $2.1 million is available for any lawful purpose. 43 hotels are already registered; short-term rentals are estimated at 350–400 with no exact count. Requested effective date January 1. No member of the public spoke on it. The state authorisation lasts three years, so reauthorisation will be required in about two and a half.
Read aloud by the town clerk as a list of department names and item numbers — supervisor, councilmember, town attorney, town clerk, building maintenance, comptroller, contract compliance, engineering, highway, human resources, information technology, planning, police, senior services, sewer plant, youth and recreation, communications, and nine referrals to the attorney. The agenda itemises the town attorney's eight: the BCD urban renewal bond (777, below); a third amendment to the inter-municipal agreement for Willowdale (778) — the same park that drew two residents to the budget hearing; a first amendment to a land lease with Up State Tower Co. (779); settlement of a lawsuit, Zenki v. Town of Amherst (780); authorisation to commence a lawsuit (781); a temporary access agreement at 419 Little Robin Road (782); and two resolutions setting public hearings to repeal sections of the town code — the Open Government Advisory Board (783), which drew the evening's objections, and the Department of Economic Development (784), which drew none and which no one mentioned aloud. Carried on a voice vote.
Two votes, on $3,215,000 of borrowing — a figure the recording never states. The board first took the environmental determination the bond required, then adopted the bond resolution itself, and the clerk called the roll — Lavin, Marinucci, Szukala, Davis — making this the only roll-call vote of the evening. Individual responses are not distinguishable on the recording. The town attorney had used this resolution an hour earlier as his example that a capital program is not a borrowing authorisation.
The board moved off its regular agenda to take an item not on it. Jennifer Adams[*] appointed interim town controller effective October 17, 2026, at an annual salary the clerk read as $155,634.88[*] under the 2026 exempt department head salary schedule, grade 1 step M. Moved from the floor, seconded, carried on a voice vote. The departing controller is identified on the recording only by the first name Michael.
The agenda governed this brief. The Town of Amherst published the October 13 agenda and a 69-megabyte agenda packet to its CivicClerk portal on time, and both were cross-checked against the audio throughout: the resolution numbering from 2026-771 to 2026-799, the $3,215,000 value of the BCD urban renewal bond, the itemised department-head resolutions and the docket lettering all come from the agenda rather than from the recording. Where the agenda and the audio disagreed on a figure or a name, the agenda governed.
The transcript was screened before it was trusted, and it passed. Of 1,075 segments, 997 are distinct; the most-common segment (“Thank you.”) accounts for 1.77 percent of the file against a roughly 10 percent failure threshold; the longest run of identical consecutive segments is two; and coverage is 92.72 of the recording's 92.8 minutes. The four inter-segment gaps over 15 seconds all fall in silences while speakers walked to the podium or slides were advanced.
The same-day work session: not recorded here, but now accounted for. The board met at 4:00 p.m. before the evening meeting. Jane Cox told the board that the work session's YouTube video carried no audio at all and the supervisor apologised from the chair; this pipeline has no transcript of it either. The session's minutes, retrieved with the agenda, explain how little was lost from the public record and raise a different question. The meeting began at 4:00 and went into executive session at 4:16, returning only to adjourn at 6:12 p.m. — so the public portion lasted sixteen minutes and the closed portion one hour fifty-six. The minutes record no action taken in public beyond the motion to close the doors. Its agenda gives three grounds: employment history of particular persons, proposed, pending and current litigation, and attorney-client privilege. Under this publication's standing policy a work session folds into the parent board's brief; what folds in here is sixteen public minutes this pipeline did not capture, and nearly two hours no recording would ever have contained.
Proper nouns were corrected against the town's own agenda packet, and the roster held. The verified Amherst roster was applied in full: the recording's “Levin” is Supervisor Shawn A. Lavin; its “Zucalla”, “Zucawa”, “Zucallo” and “Zukawa” are all Councilmember Michael Szukala; “Marinochi” is Deputy Supervisor Angela Marinucci; and “Cavanaugh” is Councilmember Jack Kavanaugh, whose excused absence was announced before the roll. Town Clerk Francina J. Spoth read the roll and the consent agenda. The “Steve” addressed repeatedly from the chair on procedure is Town Attorney Steven B. Bengart; because the recording names him only by first name, his procedural advice is attributed in the text to “the town attorney” by role.
Street names were validated. Bailey Avenue, Oxford Avenue, North Forest Road, Harlem Road, Eagle Street and Sheridan Drive all appear in this publication's Amherst street index. One address did not and is not printed: the frequent speaker rendered variously as “Don Smith”, “Tom Smith” and “Dan Smith” gives a street the recording renders as “North Long” or “Northlong”, which matches nothing in the index. He appears to be one person speaking at three hearings; this brief uses Don Smith, his most frequent rendering, and prints no address. “Andrew Morganti”, the Getzville resident who delivered the budget critique at the capital-program hearing, is contradicted by the chair's own form of address to her and is not printed.
Names carried from audio alone, and flagged. The two staff presenters — Community Development Director Lori Stilwell (also heard as “Laurie”) and Director of Special Projects Liz Berkowski — appear on no document available to this brief, nor does interim controller Jennifer Adams, town engineer Jeff Burrows, retiring Lieutenant of Detectives Patrick Mayer, attorney Paul Wolf, or the three men memorialised. The former community centre's name is rendered “Edwardsville” throughout and is given here as Eggertsville, the Amherst hamlet the building serves and the name of the hose company memorialised earlier in the same meeting. The “BCD” urban renewal plan and the “Briarhurst” grant are audio-only acronym and name respectively. “Damon College”, raised by a speaker, is Daemen University; the supervisor's reply referred to a Royal Park partnership and said he knew of no town money going to the institution itself.
What this brief does not claim. The allegation that Resolution 2026-142 was adopted in violation of the Open Meetings Law is reported as an allegation. This publication has not examined the February 2 recording or minutes and takes no view; the speaker himself said he is not a lawyer and was seeking to have his reading checked. Separately, the interim controller's salary, the $192 million figure a resident gave for the town's long-term debt, and the $7.75 million purchase price cited by another are all spoken figures that no document available to this brief confirms.
Other checks. The interests-watchlist screen was run against the full transcript and returned zero matches. The board's roster required no review gate. No scanner cross-reference was performed: this meeting concerned a budget and a rezone rather than any incident address, and the one parcel discussed at length — 4110 Bailey Avenue — is a vacant town-owned building.