Town of Amherst Zoning Board of Appeals·September 15, 2026
August's 2–2 deadlock breaks · One chair, no sign, eight months · An accessible addition in Snyder · The Town posted no agenda
A full five-member Zoning Board of Appeals spent about 50 recorded minutes on a docket the Town never published — and 43 of them on one chair in one house. The home-based salon at 4 Mac Arthur Drive[1], which deadlocked 2–2 twice in August, first on a motion to deny and then on a motion to approve, came back to a bench with every seat filled and won its special use permit — but for eight months instead of the ordinance's two years, and under seven conditions: no exterior sign, no employees, one chair, one client at a time, no parking on the street, hours cut from the 60 a week requested to 40, and a building-permit application to be filed within four weeks. Four neighbors objected again, almost entirely about a driveway sitting a couple of car lengths from the Maple Road traffic light. Earlier, and without argument, the board granted 5–0 a special use permit for a roughly 900-square-foot accessible addition on Bernhardt Drive[*] so an applicant could move his disabled mother in, and 5–0 an area variance for a 36-by-56-foot equipment building on a one-acre lot on Hopkins Road[*]. A fourth action — the first thing on the recording — passed 5–0 before its address is audible and cannot be identified, because the Town of Amherst posted no agenda for this meeting and still had not as of this writing.
Nothing about the application had changed since August. The board had. In August, with one seat empty, the Zoning Board of Appeals voted 2–2 to deny a one-chair hair salon at 4 Mac Arthur Drive, then voted 2–2 to approve it, and went home having done neither. On Tuesday all five members sat, and in the roll call that followed a motion to grant the permit, three ayes were plainly audible — Chairperson Brian Bray, member Ellen Parker, and member Kelly J. Philips, the member who had not been there in August.[2] On a five-member board, three is enough.
Petitioners Tulsi Dhimal and Pushpa Gautam[1] asked for very little and offered a good deal. Gautam[1] told the board she wanted one or two chairs, appointment only, no employees, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday and never on Sunday, with every customer parked in a driveway she said holds five cars. "I want to be able to work while still being present for my children," she said, and volunteered to accept limits on hours and on the number of appointments before anyone asked her to.[2]
Four neighbors came to object, and almost none of it was about hair. Charles Elardo[*] of 172 MacArthur Drive[*], 63 years old and 55 of them in Amherst, made the precedent argument and made it generously: he likes cars and yoga, he said, and asked whether the board would want him repairing automobiles in his driveway or running a studio out of his garage. He knows of a workout gym operating in someone's garage — "I'm not gonna say where it is or who it is" — and he noted the petitioners could probably have simply opened without asking. "I give them kudos for being honest," he said, and then asked the board to turn them down.[2]
His wife, Michelle Elardo[*] — who introduced herself only as "Charlie's wife" at the same address, and is named here from the August record and from a later speaker's reference to "what Charlie and Michelle said" — had the night's most sustained exchange with the board. Thirty-four years on MacArthur, two children raised in the house, and a list: attorneys who lived on the street and practised on Maple Road, restaurant owners who hung no sign, landscapers running large companies from houses that advertise nothing. A board member pressed her on whether her real objection was visibility rather than traffic, then reduced her case to three propositions — the driveway's nearness to Maple Road, the openness of a business operating there, and the effect of both on the street's residential character. She agreed with all three. She also said she had received no notice of a hearing about her own street; she learned of it from friends on Maple Road who did get notice, and she declined to say how many houses lie between hers and the petitioners' — the question that would settle whether she falls inside the 600-foot radius a board member cited from the dais.[2]
Michael Calandra[*] of 1575 Maple Road asked the questions a zoning board hears least often and answers least well: what happens with flammables, who checks the floor plan, are there two exits, who confirms any of it. He had built on Maple Road knowing commercial use was possible there, he said, and had not fought the funeral home — but the funeral home "had to go through large hoops." His wife Amy Calandra[*] walks grandchildren through that corner to Maple East[*] and crosses at the light by St. Gregory's[*]; the hours were what alarmed her.[2]
Dhimal[1] answered the traffic case with arithmetic. Appointments only, one at a time, nine hours a day: "9% a day max" in the transcript's rendering — nine customers a day — arriving the same way relatives already do. Nobody parks in the stretch between the driveway and the light, he said, because nobody can; it is where cars wait for green.[2]
Then a member proposed "to split the baby a little bit": a short term with hard conditions, see how it goes. He asked the Town's legal staff whether there was a floor on a special use permit's length. There is not — the code names two years, but the board may grant less.[2] His first thought was six months. Told that the Building Department is running "four to six weeks behind just in reviewing permits," and that the salon will need a plumbing permit and an inspection before it opens at all, he moved eight instead — the difference between a trial period and a trial period that expires before the trial starts.[2]
Member Kelly J. Philips then walked the eight findings the ordinance requires before a special use permit issues — consistency with the comprehensive plan, compatibility with adjacent uses, harmony with the zoning ordinance, no depreciation of neighboring property values, no hazard to health or safety, no alteration of the neighborhood's essential character, no detriment to residents or to public convenience — and found for the applicants on each. He used Elardo's[*] own hypothetical against him: "if you've got five cars up on cinder blocks that might arguably depreciate the value of adjacent property," but a salon inside a house alters nothing anyone can see.[2] It was the only item all night at which the statutory findings were recited aloud.
One wrinkle survives in the record. The motion required the petitioners to apply to the Building Inspections office within four weeks; when a Town official read the conditions back for the clerk — "so that the clerk has some accurate condition" — the four-week deadline was not among them. The Saturday hours were caught and corrected in the same exchange, from 11–5 to 9–5. Whether the four weeks made it into the resolution will be settled by the official minutes, which had not posted at the time of writing.[2]
The conditions are the headline; the calendar is the enforcement. Amherst's ordinance contemplates a two-year home-occupation permit, and Town legal staff told the board what happens at the end of one: the Building Commissioner inspects the premises, confirms there are no violations, and renews the permit administratively. In the staff member's words, "it would not come back to this committee."[2] A two-year grant, in other words, is very close to a permanent one — the neighbors who spoke Tuesday would have no scheduled moment to speak again.
An eight-month permit inverts that. It forces the petitioners back in front of the same five members, in public, before the permit can be extended, and it gives the board something August did not have: evidence. The conditions themselves are unremarkable pieces of zoning practice — they attach to this permit at this address, they bind whoever holds it, and violating one is grounds to refuse renewal. What makes the eight months unusual is that it converts a routine approval into a probation, and does it without denying anybody anything. The board member who proposed it called it splitting the baby. It is closer to lending the applicants the benefit of the doubt on a short lease.
The strongest argument the neighbors made was the slippery slope: approve a salon and the auto shop follows. A Town official answered it with history. "Home occupations have been allowed in our community since 1976," he told the room — this board is not opening a door, it is using one that has been open for half a century. Any Amherst resident who owns and lives in a home may apply, which is precisely why the request came to a public hearing rather than happening quietly.[2]
The slope also has railings. Repairing automobiles as a home occupation is strictly prohibited — the exact hypothetical raised from the podium is the one thing the code already forbids. Selling firearms from a home was likewise permitted until two years ago, when the Town amended the law to bar it: the board had granted such a permit before, and staff said the Town "thought that was an endangerment to the neighborhood."[2] A yoga studio or a garage gym would be judged on the same eight criteria the salon was, one application at a time. Precedent in zoning is not a ratchet; it is a record.
What a special use permit never does is rezone. 4 Mac Arthur Drive remains R-3 residential, exactly as the neighbors want it — a fact the August agenda states in print, and one the permit does not touch. And on the building-code worries: asked whether approval blesses a basement workspace without proper egress, staff was blunt that it does not. The petitioners are "duty bound to adhere to the building code"; a plumbing permit and an inspection come first, and the Building Commissioner, not this board, decides what may happen downstairs.[2]
The shortest hearing of the night was the one with the most in it. An architect, James Radwan[*], presented for a homeowner seeking a special use permit for an accessory dwelling unit at 265 Bernhardt Drive[*]: a single-story addition, 25 by 36 feet — about 900 square feet — with two bedrooms, a kitchen and an accessible bathroom. The existing house is a two-story; the bedrooms and bathrooms are all upstairs, which is the problem. The owner wants to move his mother, whose mobility is limited, out of the stairs and next to his family.[3]
Then the owner spoke for himself, and the application acquired a second purpose. His grandfather bought the house in 1973; he has known it since he was born in 1988; when his grandmother died in 2014 he and his then-fiancée were living in Arizona and came home to Buffalo instead. One daughter was diagnosed with autism last summer, is still nonverbal, and attends the Summit Center[*]. The addition is for his mother now and, he told the board, for his daughter later — a place she could live "that's, you know, not a group home." He apologized for getting emotional. "We don't want to change school districts," he said. "We don't want to ever have to move."[3]
No member of the audience rose. No member of the board asked a question. The chair closed the hearing, member Philips moved approval, member Goergen[*] seconded, and it passed on a voice vote the chair scored 5–0 — roughly two and a half minutes from podium to gavel.[3]
An accessory dwelling unit — a second, self-contained residence on a single-family lot — is one of the few things a homeowner can want that is neither a variance nor a right. The addition here breaks no setback and needs no dimensional relief; what it needs is permission for a second kitchen and a second front door, because that is what converts an addition into a dwelling. Hence a special use permit, a published hearing, and a public file recording a family's medical circumstances in order to obtain one. It is also why the request was granted in 150 seconds: the code anticipates exactly this use, the board's job was to confirm it fits, and nobody objected.
The board did not recite the eight §6-8-6 criteria aloud here, as it later did for the salon — a difference of practice worth noting, because the same findings are legally required either way.
Michelle Hackford[*] came for an area variance to put up a utility accessory building measuring 36 by 56 feet on a one-acre parcel — 2,016 square feet, larger than the floor plan of many houses on the road. Inside it: lawn equipment, a tractor, a utility trailer, farm equipment, and a vintage Willys[*]. Not, she said, a garage for cars. Her case was tidy and entirely about protection from the elements and from theft, and she volunteered that the site is set back in dense woods and that her neighbors are not merely unopposed but "in favor." The board's single question was how she would get to it; the answer was a long existing driveway. No one spoke from the audience. Member Shubert[*] moved, member Goergen[*] seconded, and the chair called it 5–0.[4]
Two details the record cannot supply. Hackford[*] said she lives at 2815 Hopkins Road and also that the building will serve "the proposed principal residence" there, which are not the same thing, and no posted document exists to resolve it. And nobody stated the ordinance limit the variance exceeds — the figure that would show how big an ask this was. For scale: a month earlier this board granted an accessory garage at 3341 Hopkins Road, 24 by 80 feet, against a cap of 1,584 square feet in that district.[1] That is two oversized accessory buildings on the same rural road in two consecutive meetings, and this brief can size only one of them.
505 N. Ellicott Creek Road is finished. The side-yard relief that lets a 1,065-square-foot shipping-container house sit 22 feet off the west line and 23 off the east was granted 4–0 on August 18, over three neighbors. It did not return Tuesday and had no reason to; the variance is issued and the project's remaining hurdles belong to the Building Department, not this board.[1]
Bornhava's expansion did not appear. The six area variances sought by Specialized Early Childhood Center of Western New York, Inc.[1] for a 10,400-square-foot addition at 25 Chateau Terrace were left open in August — deliberately, so the Planning Board could review the site plan first and possibly grant design exceptions that erase some of the six requests. The Town's meeting calendar puts the Planning Board's September session on September 24, nine days after this meeting, so the item's absence is what the August adjournment contemplated rather than a disappearance. It is not named anywhere in the captured audio. With no agenda posted, that absence cannot be proved rather than inferred.
The site has drawn attention elsewhere in the interval. Scanner traffic recorded by this publication shows Amherst police were dispatched to 25 Chateau Terrace at Main Street on the morning of September 9 after the school reported that construction vehicles were blocking parents from dropping children off and backing traffic up — the same complaint two neighbors brought to this board in August. Dispatch records are calls for service, not findings, and the record does not identify whose construction was involved.
And one action cannot be identified at all. The recording opens with the chair asking whether any member of the audience wished to speak, a motion to approve from member Shubert[*], a second from member Philips, and the chair announcing 5–0 — twenty-three seconds, start to finish, with the address stated before the file begins. The question to the audience means it was a hearing on an appeal rather than a housekeeping item. Beyond that the public record is silent, and will stay silent until the minutes post.
Three of Tuesday's four recorded approvals were special use permits and one was an area variance, and they are not variations on a theme — they are different legal questions with different standards.
An area variance (Hopkins Road) is dimensional relief: a setback, a height, a square footage. New York Town Law §267-b(3)(b) gives the board a five-factor balancing test and nothing else — whether the neighborhood's character would undesirably change; whether the benefit could be had some other feasible way; whether the request is substantial; whether physical or environmental conditions would suffer; and whether the difficulty was self-created, which is expressly not decisive on its own.
A special use permit (the salon, the accessory apartment) asks a different question entirely. The use is already allowed in the district — the board is not granting an exception, it is setting terms. Its test is the ordinance's own eight criteria under §6-8-6, and its real power is the conditions it may attach under §8-6-7. That is why the neighbors' strongest argument — that a business does not belong on a residential street — was the one the board could do least with: the Town Board decided that question in 1976, and what was left to this board was hours, chairs, signage and time.
Neither of these is a use variance, the hardest ask in zoning, which seeks permission for something the district flatly forbids. Nothing on Tuesday's recorded docket was one.
The roll call is not in the recording, which begins after the session was under way. All five ZBA seats appear to have been filled — Chairperson Brian Bray, Vice Chairperson Ronald Shubert[*], Kelly J. Philips, Ellen Parker and Erik A. Goergen[*] are each named in the captured audio, and the chair announced three separate 5–0 tallies on a five-member board. No recusals were announced in the portion recorded. Row numbers below are the order of items in the recording, not agenda numbers: the Town posted no agenda. Where the chair announced a tally it is given; where a vote was taken by voice without one, the row says so rather than implying a number.
The audio begins with the chair asking, "Is any member of the audience here to speak on this item?" — the standard close of a hearing on an appeal, which rules out routine housekeeping such as approval of minutes. A member said "move to approve"; the chair recorded a motion by member Shubert[*] and a second by member Philips, called for ayes, asked for opposition, heard none and announced "that passes five zero." Elapsed: 23 seconds. The subject property, the relief sought and the applicant are all stated earlier than the file begins. With no agenda posted for September 15, there is no document against which to recover them; the official minutes will.
Special use permit for an accessory dwelling unit: a single-story, 25×36-ft addition (about 900 s.f.) containing two bedrooms, a kitchen and an accessible bathroom, intended for the owner's mother and, in the future, his daughter. Presented by architect James Radwan[*] with the owner, introduced from the podium as Sean Kajawa[*]. Hearing opened and closed with no public speakers and no questions from the board. Motion by member Philips, second by member Goergen[*]. The §6-8-6 findings were not recited aloud.
Area variance for a proposed 36×56-ft (2,016 s.f.) utility accessory building on a one-acre parcel, to store lawn and farm equipment, a tractor, a utility trailer and a vintage Willys[*]. Applicant Michelle Hackford[*] said the site is set back in dense woods and that neighbors are in favor. One board question, on driveway access; no public speakers. Motion by member Shubert[*] (audio: "Schumer"), second by member Goergen[*] (audio: "Bergen"). The ordinance's accessory-building area limit for this district was not stated aloud, and the §267-b(3)(b) factors were not recited.
Continuation of the public hearing deadlocked 2–2 twice on August 18. Petitioners Tulsi Dhimal and Pushpa Gautam[1]; R-3 district; special use permit under §6-8-6.B(2) for a home-based salon. Four neighbors spoke in opposition. A member moved to grant for eight months with conditions; a second was recorded but the audio does not identify who made either the motion or the second. Member Philips then recited the ordinance's eight criteria on the record and found for the applicants on each.
Conditions as read back for the clerk: (1) no exterior signage; (2) no employees other than the petitioner; (3) one chair; (4) one client at a time; (5) hours limited to Tuesday–Friday 11 a.m.–7 p.m. and Saturday 9 a.m.–5 p.m.; (6) no parking on the street; (7) the petitioner shall apply to the Building Inspections office for a permit — the motion set a four-week deadline that the read-back omitted; and (8) the permit is limited to eight months rather than the ordinance's two years. The Saturday hours were corrected on the record from 11–5 to 9–5.
The vote. Roll call. Audible in the recording: Chairman Bray — yes; member Philips — yes; member Parker — yes. The responses of member Shubert[*] and member Goergen[*] are not captured. Three ayes carry on a five-member board, and the chair proceeded to the enunciation of conditions; the full tally awaits the official minutes. No unanimity is implied here. Both members whose responses are missing voted against approval in August.
Motion by member Parker, second by member Philips, put as "all in favor say aye." No tally was announced and no opposition is audible. The next meeting date was not stated in the captured audio.
The missing document, and what it costs. The Town of Amherst published no agenda for the September 15 Zoning Board of Appeals meeting. This was verified three ways: no packet reached the pipeline's agenda folder; none is filed on the editorial drive; and the Town's IQM2 / Minutetraq portal lists the 6:30 p.m. Regular Meeting of the Zoning Board of Appeals for that date with no documents attached. The capture log records the same finding on every poll from September 15 through September 17. Amherst has a standing agenda-posting lag — the Town Board meetings of August 31 and September 14 hit it too. The consequence is specific: the mandatory agenda cross-check that normally governs proper nouns could not be run for this meeting, so every applicant name, every entity and — the least reliable class of all — every street number in this brief rests on audio alone unless otherwise marked. House numbers are spoken once, quickly, by people not trained to enunciate them; they are the first thing a transcription model gets wrong and the last thing a reader would think to doubt. Treat "265" and "2815" as approximations pending the minutes.
The substitute cross-check. Where this meeting overlaps the last one, the August 18, 2026 ZBA agenda — a real, posted, print-quality packet — governs, and it settled a good deal. It confirms the subject address as "4 Mac Arthur Drive" in an R-3 district; it confirms the petitioners as Tulsi Dhimal & Pushpa Gautam, which corrects tonight's audio renderings "Puspa Gotham" and "Tulsi Dima"; it confirms the application as a Special Use Permit for a Type 2 Home Occupation under §6-8-6.B(2), with criteria at §6-8-6 and conditions authority at §8-6-7 — matching the "section six eight six" heard from the dais. Its call-to-order table confirms the five members' official spellings. It confirms Specialized Early Childhood Center of Western New York, Inc. as the corporate applicant for 25 Chateau Terrace, Steven D. Warfe for 505 N. Ellicott Creek Road, and 3341 Hopkins Road with its 1,584 s.f. accessory-building cap. It also names the Town staff member tonight's audio rendered "Yuletovsky," "Yeltsin" and "Ulitowski" as Daniel J. Ulatowski, listed in print as the initiating staffer on seven of that night's ten items; his title is not stated in either document, so he is described here by function rather than by a title this publication cannot source. A second legal voice, whom the chair introduced as the deputy town attorney, is described by role only: the audio of the name is unusable, and inventing a plausible one would be worse than saying so.
The board. The five-member ZBA roster — Chairperson Brian Bray, Vice Chairperson Ronald Shubert, Esq., and members Kelly J. Philips, Esq. (one "l" per the official roster), Ellen Parker and Erik A. Goergen, Esq. — is verified against the Town's official Boards & Committees page and independently confirmed in print by the August 18 agenda's attendance table, so members are stated normally here. Tonight's audio gave "Schubert" and "Schumer" for Shubert and "Gergen" and "Bergen" for Goergen; both are corrected. Attendance itself is inferred, not observed: the roll call is not in the recording.
Street validation. The town street index was run against the transcript and then checked by hand, because the extractor only sees phrases carrying a street-type word and this meeting is full of bare ones. Applied: "Bernard Drive" → Bernhardt Drive (one close match, confidence 0.93; corroborated by the applicant placing himself in Snyder and in the Amherst Central School District, which Bernhardt Drive is). Applied by hand: a bare "on Arthur" in the findings → MacArthur Drive; bare "Maple" throughout → Maple Road. Validated, unchanged: Hopkins Road, Maple Road, MacArthur Drive. Flagged, not corrected: the Town's own agenda spells the subject property "4 Mac Arthur Drive" while the street index spells the street "Macarthur Drive" — the agenda form is used for the address and the index form for the street. Landmarks named from the podium — Maple East, St. Gregory's, the Summit Center, Millard Fillmore Suburban[*] — are buildings, not streets, and are reconstructed from audio.
A correction to our own August brief. This publication's August 18 brief rendered the two speakers from 1575 Maple Road as "Michael Colander" and "Amy Kaposi." Tuesday's recording gives both, at the same address, as Calandra — two independent captures of the same household, and the clearer of the two. The names are still audio-only and remain flagged. The same two-capture logic supports Charles Elardo of 172 MacArthur Drive, heard consistently in August and September, and Michelle Elardo, who identified herself Tuesday only as "Charlie's wife" at the same address and is named here on the strength of the August record plus another speaker's reference to "Charlie and Michelle."
Names heard only in audio — treat as unverified (marked [*]). Architect James Radwan and the Bernhardt Drive homeowner, introduced once as Sean Kajawa; applicant Michelle Hackford; residents Charles Elardo, Michelle Elardo, Michael Calandra and Amy Calandra. The surname "Kajawa" occurs exactly once in fifty minutes and no published document confirms it. Names deliberately withheld: the children named in testimony about a disability diagnosis are not identified here; nothing civic turns on a minor's name.
What aired. The meeting was live-streamed on the Town's YouTube channel. The stream was detected by the capture poller at 7:05 p.m. and pulled with --live-from-start; the resulting file runs 50.0 minutes against a 6:30 p.m. start, so roughly the first six or seven minutes — call to order, roll call, and the opening of the first hearing — are not in the recording, and neither is anything that may have followed adjournment. The [*] convention flags a proper noun heard only in audio and awaiting confirmation from the official Town Clerk's record; footnote [1] marks a fact confirmed in print by the August 18, 2026 agenda.