Town of Lancaster Planning Board·September 2, 2026
A lot sold as a preserve · A clay quarry becomes 96 houses · One “wicked hairy” crossing · Five voice votes, no tallies
Six neighbors stood up in the Town Hall board room Wednesday night and told the Planning Board the same story — that the wooded lot across their street had been sold to them as a preservation area that could never be built on — and the board, at the end of an hour, recommended that the Town Board declare that the proposal to make 13 Silent Meadow a buildable lot may have a significant adverse environmental impact. That is a positive declaration, and despite the word it is the harder outcome for an applicant: it is the finding that triggers a full environmental impact statement. The board marked three of thirteen questions “moderate to large impact” on a parcel the chair himself called “less than half an acre.” Earlier in the night the board finished the other piece of unfinished business it had carried since August — the rezoning of 351 Pavement Road, 88.13 acres of working clay quarry, from General Industrial to Residential for a 96-lot single-family subdivision. It reopened the environmental form it had closed on August 5, answered the three questions Erie County's late traffic comments had left hanging, and reissued its recommendation of a negative declaration — the permissive one. Both files now go to the Town Board, which is the lead agency and the only body here that decides anything. Every vote of the night was taken by voice, and no tally was recorded on any of them.
Nobody on the Lancaster Planning Board disputed that the lot at 13 Silent Meadow is legally an exclusion lot — carved out of the Hidden Pines subdivision, never part of it, carrying none of its restrictions. What six residents came to say Wednesday is that nobody told them that when they bought their houses. “Part of the marketing ploy was that you were getting a premium lot, that you would back up to a preservation area,” said Jeff Federal[*] of 19 Silent Meadow, who built his house there and brought the sales document with him. Steve Kerwin[*] of 12 Silent Meadow brought the same map, the one with the little stickers the sales office used to mark which lots were sold and which were on hold. “It didn't say it was a wetland,” he told the board. “It said it was a preservation area that would never be touched. We built our house there because of that.”[1]
The application before the board was narrow: convert the exclusion lot to a buildable lot so a single-family house can go on it. The applicant's engineer, Ken Zalich[*] of GPI[*], opened by noting the project had been discussed at length a month earlier and offering to answer questions. The first one came from member Rebecca Anderson, and it was not technical. “You've let these people live in peace all these years with the promise that this lot would never be developed,” she said. “And now why now?” A board member added the evening's most economical piece of site analysis: “It's full of water tonight.”[1]
The public input that followed ran about twelve minutes and was unanimous. Scott Robinson[*] of 15 Silent Meadow said he called the Town of Lancaster building department before he bought in 2020 and was told the lot was non-buildable; he also told the board that on November 7 a bulldozer was dropped at the site to start clearing it, that he called Code Enforcement Officer Matthew Fischione[*], and that the work was stopped the same day and the machine hauled off several days later. “It's better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission,” he said. Frank Chicha[*] of 5 Winding Way, whose kitchen window looks at the lot, said the listing agent waved him off the question outright — “Don't worry about that. That's a preservation area. No one is ever going to build there” — and that his own lawyer had warned him he would inherit a water problem if anyone ever did. Kathy Birdsey[*] of 11 Silent Meadow made the sharpest point about provenance: the assurance did not come from a realtor or a brochure but from a named employee of the builder, the man who “showed us a lot, he sold us a lot, he accepted our checks and everything in between.”[1]
The property owner's representative answered after the vote, and did not concede the point so much as reframe it. Marketing material, he said, had “blurred the lines” with the black-and-white legal definition of a buildable lot; what buyers were told at the time — that a house could not be built there — was, in the state of the law then, “a true statement.” The lot was never deed-restricted and no restriction was filed with the county; it was “intentionally set aside as an exception lot,” which is precisely why it can be converted now. The chair was unmoved. “One of the charges of this board is to determine what's in the best interest of the community,” he said, “and I believe we're doing that. … These decisions were not simple to the people at the time, and they don't appear very simple right now.”[1]
Then came the disclosure that reframed the whole file. Chairman Carlo DiRienzo has sat on this board for 31 years, and he was on it when Hidden Pines first came through. “With Cindy's help we found the minutes,” he said — a reference to the board's secretary — “and I voted no on that subdivision because of the environmental hazards that were in place then, and they're still there now. And promises were made that this was an unbuildable lot.” His one regret, offered plainly: back then the board did not think to demand a deed restriction. “We weren't that smart, and we didn't ask it or require it. And I've learned my lesson since.”[1]
The board then worked the short environmental form on the record, question by question. Question 2 — change in the use or intensity of use of land — drew a debate about scale that decided the night. “It's one lot, but it's a large impact on that lot,” a member argued; “we're here to talk about one lot.” Moderate to large. Question 3, on the character or quality of the existing community, turned on what “community” means, and the board asked Deputy Town Attorney Brad Davidzik[*] whether it was allowed to look only at this neighborhood. “You have quite a bit of discretion,” he answered. “This community is not defined.” Narrowed to Silent Meadow, the answer was yes: moderate to large. Question 9, adverse change to natural resources: moderate to large. Question 10, erosion and drainage, produced the sharpest exchange with the applicant's team — a member insisting that the potential increases even if it can be engineered away, the applicant's side answering that mitigation is “not a hope, that's what the engineering shows” — and settled at no-or-small. Question 4 was skipped for the simplest of reasons: Lancaster has never designated a critical environmental area.[1]
The motion that followed came out of the mover's mouth backwards — he began “a recommendation for a negative deck,” was corrected at the table, and restated it as positive. Seconded, voice vote, ayes; no tally taken, and no opposition audible on the recording. Announcing it, the chair let his own discomfort show: “I don't even like to say it. A positive declaration on something that's less than half an acre. It's kind of strange, because it's small — but it has a large impact to the neighbors.”[1]
Whether it holds is another matter, and the board said so out loud. Asked by a member whether the Town Board could simply open the environmental review itself and issue a negative declaration instead, the answer from the table was yes — “they can just say we don't believe you” — because the Town Board is the lead agency and this board is, in the chair's word, “a resource.” The legal counterweight came from Davidzik[*], who pointed out that environmental review is only one of the doors the application has to get through: the Town Board “could deny it for a different reason… because it doesn't meet character of the town.”[1]
Under the State Environmental Quality Review Act — SEQR, pronounced “seeker,” which is how it appears throughout the recording — a reviewing board answers a standard form and reaches one of two determinations.
A negative declaration finds no significant adverse environmental impact. It is the clearance; the project moves on.
A positive declaration finds that a significant adverse impact may occur. It does not deny anything. What it does is require the applicant to prepare a draft environmental impact statement — a long, expensive study with its own scoping, public comment and findings process — before the approval question can even be reached.
So a reader who sees “positive” and assumes the neighbors lost has it exactly backwards. Positive declarations are uncommon on projects this small, which is why the chair said he didn't like saying it and why the applicant's side spent the next four minutes arguing about proportion.
Three phrases were used for the same half acre Wednesday, and they do not mean the same thing.
Exclusion lot is the town's docket language on the agenda: a parcel deliberately left out of the approved subdivision. The applicant's side called it an exception lot, which is the same idea — and, as its representative pointed out, the reason no subdivision restrictions attach to it.
Preservation area is what the sales map said. It is a marketing term, not a recorded legal status. Had the board of the 1990s required a deed restriction or a filed conservation restriction, the lot would be closed to development no matter what the wetland rules did later. It did not, and that is the whole case in one sentence.
There is one piece of engineering back there that is part of the subdivision: a bioretention facility serving the development's storm system.
The first case of the night was a loose end. On August 5 the board had recommended a negative declaration on the rezoning of 351 Pavement Road — 88.13 acres on the east side of Pavement Road south of Walden Avenue, an active clay quarry zoned General Industrial with a sand, gravel and aggregate overlay, proposed for Residential zoning and a 96-lot single-family subdivision with communal green space, trail access, sidewalks and crosswalks. That recommendation carried 6–1, with Anderson voting no, and it was made expressly contingent on traffic comments from the Erie County Department of Public Works that had not yet arrived. They arrived afterward. Two questions on the long-form environmental assessment — 19 and 20 — had also been left blank when the board worked from a superseded version of the form.[1][3]
Attorney Marc Romanowski[*], for the developer, walked the county's traffic comments in person and conceded the first outright: the proposed northern driveway is too far north, sitting in the guardrail area on the slope down from the rail crossing, and will be relocated to where the existing drive already is. The second he dismissed — there will be no stop signs on the inbound lanes, because that would queue cars back onto Pavement Road and “makes no sense.” The third is live: whether a southbound left-turn lane is warranted. The project's traffic engineer told him it might be, for one evening peak hour, and hadn't had time for a full analysis. Romanowski's[*] own instinct was that a turn lane at the bottom of the hill would be worse than none — “that's a recipe for disaster” — and that the answer might be a single consolidated driveway pushed farther south. All of it, he proposed, belongs to site plan review rather than to the environmental finding.[1]
Anderson was not willing to let the bicycle question go with it. She has served on a rail-trail board in Orchard Park for about twenty years and rides the Heritage Trail herself, and she described the Pavement Road crossing in terms no traffic study captures: “It is one wicked hairy crossing there. It is ugly, and people don't stop, and they come flying down the hill southbound, and there you are trying to get across with your bike — and it's uphill.” Of every crossing on the trail from Town Line westward, she said, this is the most dangerous. She added the winter version: cars stopped to turn left, drivers cresting the hill too late, “and there are people in the ditch.”[1]
That got form question 13 reopened along with 19 and 20. Its sub-question on degrading pedestrian and bicycle accommodations came back “small impact may occur” rather than a flat no, and the board added a note under other impacts recording that safety at the trail crossing could be mitigated through signage and other measures — a note, the member who proposed it stressed, not an objection. Question 13 overall stayed at no. Questions 19 (disadvantaged communities) and 20 (future physical climate risks, run down its whole list from 100-year flood to landslides to sea level rise) came back no. “Thank you for going over that,” one voice said as it ended. “It helps people understand what they're talking about. This is new.”[1]
The board then reissued its August recommendation of a negative declaration — voice vote, ayes, no tally, no audible dissent. The chair added one condition of practice rather than law: the applicant's written responses to the county landed the same day and the board had not read them, which does not change the recommendation, but “once it gets to the town board, the town board is going to make sure that Erie County has a chance to respond to your responses.” Romanowski[*] hoped to have the turn-lane answer by Tuesday — the Town Board's next meeting, six days later.[1]
With the business done, he passed around a single set of renderings, unprompted and admittedly irrelevant to the vote, because the owner — Paul Marinaccio, who told the board in August that the quarry is a clay quarry and the land around it will support houses — wanted the board to see them. Not cookie-cutter, his attorney said; different houses, high-end, on the order of a Spalding Lake. The board looked, asked about the gazebos on the site plan and the tree species, and sent him off. The rezoning itself is not theirs to grant.[1][3]
SEQR review is a sequence, not a vote, and a board can go back into it. Here the board did so twice over.
On August 5 it reviewed the full environmental assessment form — the long form, used because this is a Type 1 action, the category the state presumes more likely to have significant impacts — and recommended a negative declaration on eighteen impact headings. Two problems followed it out the door: the board had worked from an older version of Part 2, leaving questions 19 and 20 unanswered, and the county's traffic response had not come in.
So on September 2 the board moved to reopen, answered 13, 19 and 20 on the record, and reissued the same determination. Nothing new was approved; the file was simply made complete enough to survive the next stage.
Why the county has a say at all: under state law, municipal zoning actions near county roads and county property are referred to the county for review before the town acts, and the county's comments come back as a recommendation the town must formally consider. That is the machinery that produced the Erie County DPW letter here — and, because it arrived after the board had already voted, the rework.
The meeting opened with the Pledge, a roll call answered by all seven members, and approval of the August 19 minutes with a single correction — one word changed from “or” to “for,” a fix already discussed and already made. “It changes the sentence to make some sense,” the chair observed. The communications list was reviewed at the members' desks without a motion.[1]
Both items the board sent up the ladder on August 19 stayed gone, as they should have. Its recommendations to approve a site plan and special use permit for an automotive recycling and OEM parts e-commerce business at 1230 Town Line Road, and a site plan for New Enterprise Stone & Lime Co.'s replacement batch plant at 5466 Genesee Street and 360 Harris Hill Road, are now the Town Board's business; neither reappeared here.[3]
One item that has not yet reached a docket surfaced in the closing round. Town Engineer Ed Schiller raised a letter on the communications list about a proposed development on Broadway — a project he and Code Enforcement Officer Matthew Fischione[*] have met with twice, and whose applicants they advised to talk to the neighbors first, then send the town a copy of the letter they send the residents. Members placed it as an extension of an existing community's earlier phase. The address was said aloud two different ways and is not printed here. Nothing about it is before the board yet; a reader on that stretch of Broadway may want to watch for it.[1]
The board also reminded members that town identification cards are available and that the tentative 2027 meeting schedule had gone out for comment, and adjourned about fifty-nine minutes after the gavel. The next regular meeting is September 16.[1]
Chairman DiRienzo said it in his opening remarks and again to a resident an hour later, and it is the single most useful thing to know about this body: “We are an advisory and recommending board and not a final decision-making body.”
On both files Wednesday the Lancaster Town Board is the designated lead agency under SEQR and the body that acts. The Planning Board's product is a recommendation and a reasoned record — and, as members acknowledged out loud, the Town Board is free to reach its own environmental determination without redoing the questionnaire.
The practical consequence for anyone who spoke Wednesday: the argument is not over, and it moves. Residents were told plainly they will have their say at the Town Board.
Lancaster is currently operating under Local Law No. 2 of 2026, adopted February 17, which imposes a temporary moratorium on land-use applications and approvals in the Bowmansville hamlet and the Lancaster portion of the Town Line hamlet. It was triggered by a proposed 122-room hotel about 1,000 feet east of Transit Road, and it runs to February 27, 2027 while a town committee works on hamlet boundaries, an overlay district, buffers, lighting and signage.
A moratorium is a pause on a place, not on a subject: inside those boundaries the town stops accepting and acting on applications; outside them, business continues normally.
Neither application heard Wednesday was identified — on the agenda, or by anyone in the room — as lying inside those hamlets, and no one invoked the moratorium at any point in the meeting. It is noted here because it is the live constraint on Lancaster land use this year, not because it bore on this docket.
Five recorded motions, every one taken as a voice vote on the chair's standard call — “all those in favor say aye … opposed say no.” No roll call was taken on any motion and no tally was recorded, so no vote below can be given a numerical result; where this brief says a motion carried, it means ayes were audible and no audible opposition followed. That is a departure from the board's own practice as recorded in its August minutes, where every motion was decided by named roll call. The opening roll call, read by the board's secretary, was answered by all seven members: Chairman Carlo DiRienzo, Rebecca Anderson, John Copas[*], Anthony Gorski[*], Joseph Keefe[*], Lawrence Korzeniewski[*] and Michael Reinhold[*]. No recusals were announced. Also at the table: Deputy Town Attorney Brad Davidzik[*], Town Engineer Ed Schiller of Wm. Schutt & Associates, and Code Enforcement Officer Matthew Fischione[*].
Moved and seconded to approve the minutes of the August 19, 2026 meeting with one previously discussed correction: a single word changed from “or” to “for.” The chair noted the change “makes some sense” of the sentence. Carried on a voice vote.
Moved and seconded to reopen the State Environmental Quality Review Act review of the major subdivision and rezoning at 351 Pavement Road, SBL 105.00-3-41, in order to answer questions #19 and #20 of the full environmental assessment form, Part 2 — left unanswered because the board had worked from a superseded version of the form — and, at a member's request, to reopen question #13 (impact on transportation) as well, Erie County Department of Public Works traffic comments having arrived after the board's August 5 recommendation.
Carried on a voice vote. The board then worked the three questions on the record. Question 13: no overall impact, with sub-question (d) — degrading existing pedestrian or bicycle accommodations — answered “small impact may occur,” and a note entered under other impacts that safety at the Heritage Trail crossing can be mitigated through signage and other measures. Question 19 (disadvantaged communities): no. Question 20 (future physical climate risks), run through its full list including 100- and 500-year flood, sea level rise, drought, temperature extremes, extreme storms, landslides, coastal erosion and stormwater flooding: no.
Moved and seconded to proceed with the board's recommendation of a negative declaration to the Town Board, the designated lead agency, on the proposed rezoning of 88.13 acres at 351 Pavement Road from GI — General Industrial (with a sand, gravel and aggregate overlay) to R — Residential, for a 96-lot single-family subdivision. The action is a Type 1 action reviewed on the full environmental assessment form. Carried on a voice vote; no opposition is audible on the recording.
For continuity: the board's original recommendation, made August 5, 2026, carried by named roll call 6–1 — Rebecca Anderson voting no, John Copas excused — and was expressly contingent on Erie County DPW's follow-up response. Wednesday's action completes and reissues that determination. The chair advised the applicant that the Town Board will give Erie County an opportunity to respond to the applicant's written answers, which reached the town the same day and which this board had not read.
After public input closed, the chair stated that the board would open SEQR on the Hidden Pines item and proceeded directly into the short environmental assessment form. Unlike the Pavement Road item earlier the same night, no motion to open SEQR was made or seconded on the recording, and no vote was taken. The board had previously commenced coordinated review on this unlisted action; responses from the Erie County Water Authority and the state Department of Transportation are in the record.
Listed here for completeness. The official minutes, when posted, are the authority on whether a motion was made off-microphone.
Moved and seconded to recommend to the Town Board, as lead agency, a positive declaration on the proposed conversion of the exclusion lot at 13 Silent Meadow, Hidden Pines Subdivision Phase 2a, to a buildable lot — based, in the mover's words, on the answers the board had just given. The mover began the motion as a “negative deck,” was corrected at the table and restated it as positive before the second. Carried on a voice vote; no opposition is audible on the recording.
The board's answers on the short environmental assessment form: Q1 material conflict with an adopted land use plan or zoning — no. Q2 change in use or intensity of use of land — moderate to large. Q3 impair the character or quality of the existing community — moderate to large, after the deputy town attorney advised the board it has “quite a bit of discretion” in how narrowly it defines community. Q4 critical environmental area — not applicable; Lancaster has designated none. Q5 traffic, transit, biking, walkways — no. Q6 energy — no. Q7(a) water supplies — no; Q7(b) wastewater — no, the downstream analysis the state flagged applying only to projects over 2,500 gallons per day. Q8 historic, archaeological, architectural or aesthetic resources — no. Q9 adverse change to natural resources — moderate to large. Q10 erosion, flooding or drainage — no or small. Q11 hazard to environmental resources or human health — no. Q12 and Q13, disadvantaged-community burdens — no.
Effect: a positive declaration, if adopted by the Town Board, requires the applicant to prepare a draft environmental impact statement before the conversion question is reached. The Town Board is not bound by the recommendation and may reach its own determination.
After a closing round with the engineer, the building department and legal, a reminder about town identification cards for members and a note that the tentative 2027 meeting schedule had gone out for comment, a member moved to adjourn. Seconded; carried on a voice vote, about fifty-nine minutes after the call to order.
The chair asked members to review the communications list at their desks. No motion was made and none is required; the list is entered in the official minutes. One item on it — a letter concerning a proposed development on Broadway — was raised by the town engineer during the closing round.
This brief is built from the livestream of the 7:00 p.m. public meeting, the Town's official agenda for September 2, 2026, and the Planning Board's own minutes of August 5 and August 19, 2026. The Lancaster Planning Board PDFs are scanned images with no text layer; the agenda and both sets of minutes were rasterized and read by optical character recognition, so odd characters and spacings in those documents are scan artefacts rather than the town's spellings. Where the agenda and the audio disagree on a proper noun, the agenda governs.
Street validation could not be run. The pipeline's street-name check requires a town street inventory, and no lancaster_streets.txt exists yet — Lancaster's list has not been built. Rather than guess, every street name in this brief was cross-checked against the agenda and the board's official minutes instead: Pavement Road, Silent Meadow, Walden Avenue, Genesee Street, Harris Hill Road, Town Line Road and Central Avenue all appear in those documents. Winding Way does not; it comes from a resident's own statement of his address and is flagged accordingly. Street names heard only in audio and confirmed nowhere have been left out.
The agenda corrected the audio on both cases. The recording renders the first item as “351 pavement” throughout; the agenda gives 351 Pavement Road, SBL 105.00-3-41, Project #2303. The second item is rendered “Hidden Pine Subvision, Phase 2A, 13 Silent Metal”; the agenda gives Hidden Pines Subdivision, Phase 2a, 13 Silent Meadow. The agenda's term for the parcel's status is exclusion lot; the applicant's representative called it an exception lot, and both are reported above. The zoning history, acreage, parcel number and the August vote breakdown come from the board's August 5 minutes, which also give the applicant's attorney as Marc Romanowski (the audio says “Mark”) and the property owner as Paul Marinaccio.
Every Planning Board surname needed correcting against the verified roster: the roll call transcribes as “John Koltes” for John Copas, “Anna Vigorski” for Anthony Gorski, “Joseph Keith” for Joseph Keefe, “Lawrence Gorsoneski” for Lawrence Korzeniewski and “Michael Ray” for Michael Reinhold. “Mr. Fichon” is Code Enforcement Officer Matthew Fischione; “Brad” is Deputy Town Attorney Brad Davidzik and “Ed” is Town Engineer Ed Schiller of Wm. Schutt & Associates, both confirmed present at this board by the August minutes. SEQR is rendered “seeker” throughout the recording, and “negative deck” is negative declaration. The clerk who read the roll and kept the record is addressed on tape only as “Cindy”; the board's own August minutes name its secretary as Cynthia “Cyndi” Maciejewski, and the communications list styles her Building and Zoning Clerk, a title the pipeline's town file assigns to another employee. She is therefore described here by role rather than by title, pending confirmation.
Names that appear only in the audio remain unverified: the six residents who spoke (Jeff Federal, Steve Kerwin, Scott Robinson, Frank Chicha, David Blazak and Kathy Birdsey — agendas list entities, not people), engineer Ken Zalich, the firm GPI, and the property owner named on the record as Forbes Capretto, which the recording also renders several other ways. Two things are deliberately withheld. A second applicant representative gave a firm name that is unintelligible on the recording, so he is described by role. And the name of the builder's employee whom one resident identified as the person who made the preservation representation is not printed: it is a single poorly captured surname attached to a serious allegation, and no official source confirms it. The Broadway address discussed in the closing round was spoken two different ways seconds apart and is likewise not printed.
Two caveats on the recording itself. It is an open-room microphone with heavy crosstalk, and individual board members other than the chair and Rebecca Anderson often cannot be told apart by voice; where this brief says “a member,” that is why, and the mover and seconder of each motion are not identifiable on the audio. Separately, the chair's own attributions — the 31 years, the vote against the original subdivision — are placed from context and the presiding role, not from a self-identification on tape. The official minutes will settle both. No motion Wednesday was put to a roll call, so this brief reports no vote counts; readers who need them should wait for the posted minutes.
Finally, the specific addresses at issue — 351 Pavement Road and 13 Silent Meadow — were checked against this publication's address database of emergency dispatches since May 2026. Neither appears in it, and neither does any address on Silent Meadow. Nothing in the dispatch record bears on either property, and none is reported here.
Names carrying [*] were corrected from likely transcription errors against the Town's verified Planning Board roster, the official agenda or the board's posted minutes — or are names heard only in the audio and not yet confirmed by any official source.