Village of Williamsville Planning & Architectural Review Board·September 8, 2026
A restaurant finally approved · The chair votes no · A frozen wall nobody names · 51 apartments, no motions
On its third look in four months, the Planning & Architectural Review Board approved the architecture of the 5630 Main Street restaurant redevelopment 4–1, with Chair Catherine Waterman-Kulpa casting the lone no and saying on the record that the new fiber-cement facade uses materials “in a way that they appear to be fake.” Three waivers cleared the way first, two of them written to survive a code interpretation the board itself is not allowed to make. The project’s architect told the board the building’s creek-side wall is being rebuilt because the retaining wall behind it is moving — the only reference all night to the Ellicott Creek stone wall that the Historic Preservation Commission nominated as a village landmark fourteen days earlier, a nomination that bars this parcel’s owners from altering that wall until the trustees rule. Nobody in the room said the word “landmark.” Elsewhere: Steve’s Diner at 5759 Main Street won one sign 5–0 with a waiver and had its second tabled 5–0 after a sustained argument about what a sign band is; two multi-family proposals totaling 51 apartments on three South Long Street parcels drew ninety minutes of design criticism and not a single motion across four docketed items; and the board’s own Rules & Regulations were held over for the third meeting running, this time because two members were absent. The July 20 minutes were approved 5–0. Next meeting: October 5.
The corner where Main Street meets Mill Street, hard against Ellicott Creek behind Glen Park, has been in front of this board since spring. It was tabled on June 1 and sent to the Zoning Board of Appeals. Its site plan passed on July 20 while its architecture was tabled a second time, after the exterior finish quietly changed from stucco to a material village code does not allow on a one-story building. On Tuesday the architecture came back with fiber-cement panels instead, and the board approved it — but not unanimously, and not before an hour of granular argument about corners, coping and glass.
The project’s architect[*] opened by handing samples across the dais and describing the change: out with the disputed synthetic stucco, in with a cementitious panel system, with the building’s existing angled soffit carried around the west side that faces the creek and returned partway along the north face. Colors, transparency and massing, she said, were unchanged from what the board had already seen.
What consumed the hour was not the concept but the joinery. Members walked the drawings line by line — a legend that labeled the same wall BRK1 in one place and BRK2 in another (“that should be BRK2,” the architect conceded, calling the first a typo); a glass sample passed around and held up to the light because it did not look as clear as its spec sheet promised; and, at length, exactly how a coping cap, a J channel, an H channel and a mitered corner would meet at the northwest corner of the building. “You’re collecting a lot from this material,” one member said, unimpressed.
The transparency question was harder, and the board could not answer it. Village code requires 70 percent glazing between three and ten feet above grade on a primary facade. This building fronts two streets. Is 70 percent required on each facade, or across both combined? “It feels ambiguous to me,” one member said. Nobody at the table would own the reading. “I can only give an opinion,” came the caution. “I can’t give a code interpretation. That’s binding.”
So the board built the ambiguity into its motions. It first granted a waiver for the south facade, which improves from 35 percent to just over 42 percent glazing — comfortably inside the board’s 50-percent latitude, which floors any waiver at 35 percent. It then granted a second, conditional waiver covering the east and south facades read cumulatively, at just over 46 percent, expressly to supersede the first motion if the zoning enforcement officer decides the two facades are counted together. If he decides they are separate, the east facade — stuck at about 11 percent and staying there — is beyond anything this board can grant, and the applicant goes to the Zoning Board of Appeals. The applicant asked for the second motion for exactly that reason: “I’m just asking for the efficiency of time to not come back for an amended waiver.”
Then the corner. Code says material changes shall occur at inside corners, not outside ones, and not mid-plane. The architect argued the parapet, the clay caps and the rolled roofing left no honest inside corner to change at. The waiver carried on a roll call, 4–1. Minutes later the approval motion — moved by David Vitka, seconded by Eugene Richards, architectural review only, as submitted — carried on the same 4–1 split. The chair voted no both times and, unusually for this board, said why into the record: the fiber-cement system and its joinery pieces “provide an aesthetic that I do not feel is consistent with the design standards,” and “it is using materials in a way that they appear to be fake.”
With its site plan approved in July and its architecture approved Tuesday, the redevelopment now has everything the Planning Board has to give. What remains is not this board’s: the zoning enforcement officer’s reading of the transparency rule, a response to the county referral, and corrections to the final drawings. And one more thing nobody raised.
Tuesday’s transparency argument is a clean illustration of a distinction that trips up almost everyone watching a land-use board, so it is worth spelling out.
The practical result: the applicant left with a waiver that works whichever way the interpretation lands, and one open path to the ZBA if it lands the wrong way. Nothing was decided twice; one of the two motions is simply waiting to find out whether it is needed.
Five minutes and fifty seconds into the meeting, a member asked why the wood paneling coming off the windows on the building’s west side — the side facing Ellicott Creek — would be filled in with block to match the rest of the wall. The architect’s answer was structural, not aesthetic.
“Structurally that wall is having a lot of movement issues,” she said, “given the retaining wall that is moving.” Because of that, “most of that wall is getting rebuilt in kind” — the building’s wall, that is, with the failed window lintels taken out and the openings closed so the repair reads as one continuous surface. A member agreed it was a good idea, then spent the next twenty minutes arguing that code might not permit it.
That was the whole of it. The words landmark, historic, preservation, nomination and Mill Street do not appear anywhere in the 100-minute recording. The retaining wall entered the meeting as an engineering nuisance pushing a building wall out of plumb, and left it the same way.
Fourteen days earlier, on August 25, the Historic Preservation Commission voted to nominate that retaining wall — the early-to-mid-1800s stone wall on the east bank of Ellicott Creek, built to hold the bank beside the vanished Dodge Mill — as a Village of Williamsville landmark. The nomination covers four private parcels, read into the record one at a time: 5630 Main Street and 16, 20 and 26 Mill Street[*]. A section of the wall has already collapsed into the water.
The commission’s urgency was procedural, and the village attorney spelled it out for them: the nomination itself, not the designation months later, is what bites. “If you nominated it today, then they can’t pull any permits until the issue is resolved, until the landmark is voted.” Routine repair and maintenance remain permitted. Alterations do not. Four owners — three of them selling or sold — are restricted from altering a collapsing structure on their own land.
Six days after that, on August 31, the Board of Trustees designated 13 South Cayuga Road a landmark and never touched the wall. It was not referred, not scheduled for hearing, not mentioned. It has not been on a trustees’ docket since. Only the trustees can lift or confirm the freeze, and they have not taken it up.
So on Tuesday the Planning Board finished a redevelopment on one of the four frozen parcels — a redevelopment whose creek-side structural work is being driven by the movement of the frozen wall — without anyone asking how the two interact. The board is not obliged to ask; a landmark nomination is not in its jurisdiction, and this board’s writ is design. But the information was in the room. Chair Waterman-Kulpa is also vice-chair of the Historic Preservation Commission, and the clerk’s roll recorded her present on August 25 when the nomination carried on a voice vote with no negatives.
“Nominated for consideration” sounds like a step that changes nothing until somebody votes. In Williamsville it is the opposite, and the sequencing is what a reader needs.
Steve’s Diner is opening in the back corner of the plaza at Main and Garrison Road, and it wanted two signs. It got one.
An attorney for Benderson Development[*] — the applicant on this plaza since at least the board’s June 1 review — presented a 42-square-foot sign on the south elevation, above the doors and facing the parking lot, replacing an existing sign in the same spot, plus a smaller 20.62-square-foot sign on the east elevation to catch traffic on Garrison Road. Both, the application said, would sit “within the architectural peak.”
That phrase was the problem, and a member had read the application closely enough to use it. Section 84-10 says no sign shall obscure, alter or cover the architectural features of a building. “You actually call it out yourself,” the member said, “when you said that they would be within the existing architectural peak.” The attorney argued the peak is the sign band — the horizontal area between the top of the first-floor windows and the cornice — and that an existing sign has been there for years. The reply was the board’s cleanest line of the night: “The fact that somebody put something up there maybe in the past isn’t a good argument that we should continue to allow something that’s no longer conforming.”
On the south side, the board relented and said why. The existing sign comes down, the new one goes up in the same place, and one member allowed that it amounted to “put some lipstick on that thing, because it’s a pretty ugly building.” It passed 5–0, wrapped in an explicit waiver of §84-10(A), approving materials, placement and halo lighting on condition the lighting match the other halo lighting on the building — a motion its own author described, out loud, as “really messed up and complicated.”
The east elevation got nowhere. Every other sign along that facade sits in a narrow band below the roofline; this one would climb into the peak. “It’s a dramatic change,” a member said, and warned against doing the building “piecemeal” — the board had told this applicant before that it would happily approve a coordinated redesign of the whole facade, but not a sign at a time. “Aesthetically, it’s kind of oversized for where it is. I understand that you’re trying to draw the business off of Garrison. Love that. Want the business to succeed. However, it just doesn’t fit the facade. It’s like, sorry, you’ve got a strip mall.” Offered the chance to withdraw, the attorney asked instead to table. Tabled 5–0.
Twice on Tuesday an applicant reached for the same escape hatch — let the zoning enforcement officer decide — and twice a member pushed back, most sharply here:
“I think that you’re trying to skip ahead to Gary about an interpretation. We’re talking about aesthetics. That’s not Gary’s realm. That’s this board’s realm.”
The line marks a real boundary. Whether the peak legally qualifies as a “sign band” under the code’s definitions is a question for the zoning enforcement officer, appealable to the ZBA. Whether a 20-square-foot sign belongs on that elevation of that building is a judgment the village has assigned to this board and nobody else. An applicant who wins the definition can still lose the design.
The evening’s biggest development story produced no action at all, by design. Items 2026-PB-06A and 06S (26 South Long Street, architectural and site plan) and 2026-PB-07A and 07S (31 and 55 South Long Street, the same pair) were handled as a high-level sketch-plan review: ninety minutes of criticism, and the applicant sent away to redraw. “We’re high-level sketch plan review tonight,” the chair said. “We’ll have those detailed comments for you next time.”
The same team presented both. The smaller site is 11 units on an existing parking lot beside the village Department of Public Works parcel; the larger, which the presenter called “55 South Long,” is 40 units with 60 parking spaces on an oddly shaped lot that narrows to a point. Both are three stories. One phrase did not survive its first outing: a presenter described the smaller project as a “workforce housing development,” and was cut off within seconds — “Multi-family for rent. That’s really what we’re doing. So we’re not going to talk about workforce.” The presentation proceeded on those terms.
An encroachment nobody knew about. The 26 South Long parking area encroaches onto the adjacent village DPW parcel — not a new mistake, the attorney said, but a pre-existing condition dating to roughly 2018, when a site plan was approved against a property line that a fresh survey has now shown was drawn in the wrong place. A member remembered the 2018 variance and did not remember any encroachment. Resolving it means going before the Village Board for an easement; the applicant asked that it be handled as a condition of site-plan approval rather than a prerequisite.
What the board actually wants. Its dominant note across both sites was repetition. “Is there a way to make this look like it is not an apartment building?” one member asked, sending the design team to look at a multi-family building on Evans Street the board had pushed to break up years ago, and at townhouses on California Drive it considered more successful. “Chopping up the side means more than rhythm of A-B-A-B-A-B.” And, on doing it the cheap way: “I know it’s economy to do it that way, but it also screams the wrong character for the village.”
Accessibility drew the sharpest questioning of the night. Told the 26 South Long building has no interior refuse room, a member answered flatly: “That’s a big red flag for me,” citing a nearby village building where residents with mobility devices cannot open the enclosure gate and leave their garbage on the pavement. Members pressed the team to move a mid-building accessible unit toward the accessible parking, to design a real accessible route around the meter wall, and to reconsider a trash enclosure that appeared to crowd the handicapped space. The larger building fared better: it has an elevator to all three floors and a central refuse room served from inside.
Everything else on the list. The village’s Environmental Advisory Council filed vegetation comments. The 55 South Long site will get a Phase I environmental assessment because of past use on the parcel — “I expect there will be surprises there,” the attorney said — and the financing will not close without one. The fire chief raised access concerns at 26 South Long that generated no formal recommendation; a member declined to litigate fire code at a planning table: “There’s going to have to be a fire code sharing its analysis. It’s not going to happen here.” Traffic Safety flagged cars queuing on South Long during events at the athletic facility across from 55, and the shared verdict was that drivers would simply turn right and make a U-turn. Members also want the curb cut narrowed, utilities buried and located on the plans, snow storage shown, a dark corner of the fire lane lit without wall packs, the five trees along the north line kept, and the aging fence between the site and the Walgreens[*] parking lot accounted for — “a rather crappy looking fence,” as one member put it, that the applicant confirmed is his.
The one thing the board conceded it cannot do is the thing it most wanted. Traffic Safety had worried about children from the new apartments crossing to the park. “We can’t require them to put a crosswalk in,” a member said. “The village can put a crosswalk in. We can’t make them do offsite.” Both applications return with detailed drawings; variances remain pending at the Zoning Board of Appeals, including first-floor ceiling height (code wants 15 feet, the plans show 10, with 12 floated as a compromise the board could reach by waiver) and relief from primary-facade requirements on the south elevation of 26 South Long — a request that drew the board’s simplest question: “Why can’t you make it look like a primary facade is supposed to look?”
The printed agenda gives every item a blank “Motion: ______ Seconded: ______” line. Four of Tuesday’s items left those blanks empty, and that is not a failure of the meeting — it is how a combined planning and architectural review board works through a big project.
Notice the letters. Williamsville’s docket splits each project into an A item (architectural review — materials, facades, massing) and an S item (site plan review — parking, drainage, refuse, landscaping, access). They are separate reviews with separate motions, which is why 5630 Main Street could have its site plan approved in July and its architecture approved in September, and why 26 South Long appears twice on one page.
Both reviews normally run through sketch plan first: the applicant brings concept drawings, the board reacts, nothing is voted. It is the cheapest stage at which to hear that your facade reads as one long apartment block. Only when the design settles does the board take formal action, and only then does an approval or denial attach.
So: nothing was approved on South Long Street Tuesday, nothing was denied, and nothing was tabled either — there was no motion to table. All four items simply remain pending, alongside variance applications the Zoning Board of Appeals has yet to hear. A reader watching for a vote should watch the October and November agendas.
The board’s review of its own Rules & Regulations has now slipped three meetings. It was tabled 6–0 on July 20 after a long session; on Tuesday it was set aside again without a motion, on the chair’s reasoning that “we should hold off on rules and rights since two members are not here.” Members were asked to review the recirculated draft before next time. Walter Pacer and Wesley Stone were the two absent; the other five sat the full meeting and no recusals were declared.
The July 20 minutes were approved 5–0 at the top of the meeting; the motion language itself is not audible on the recording, which picks up at “all in favor.” And the next meeting date is stated two ways: the printed agenda closes with “Monday, October 5, 2026,” work session at 6:30 and regular meeting at 7; the chair announced “October 6th” from the table. October 5 is a Monday and matches the board’s normal cadence, so the agenda is reported here as authoritative — but the discrepancy is real and worth checking against the village calendar before making the trip.
Five of the board’s seven members were seated: Chair Catherine Waterman-Kulpa presiding, with Colleen Leiker, Thomas Petrocelli, Eugene Richards and David Vitka. Walter Pacer and Wesley Stone were absent. No recusals were declared and none appear to have been required. The board votes mostly by voice with the chair announcing the count; the two contested 5630 Main Street motions were taken by roll call, name by name. Where no tally was announced, this brief says so rather than inferring one. Rows marked with no motion are docketed items that produced no board action — they are listed so nothing on the agenda vanishes from the record. Tallies below are as recorded in the meeting audio; the official September 8 minutes are not yet posted.
The agenda’s first substantive item. The recording picks up at “all in favor”; the motion language, mover and seconder are not audible. The chair announced the result as five to zero. The July 20 meeting was a special session the village’s published schedule did not carry.
Waiver from the requirement that a primary facade provide transparent glazing equal to at least 70 percent of the wall area between three and ten feet above grade, as applied to the south facade. The chair recited that the previous condition was 35 percent transparency and the proposal is just over 42 percent, and that the board may waive up to 50 percent of a requirement, placing the request within its authority. Motion made from the chair after an initial misstatement of “east facade,” corrected on the record to south; seconded; carried on a voice vote with the count announced.
A second transparency waiver, written to cover the east and south facades combined at just over 46 percent glazing between three and ten feet above grade, and expressly to supersede M2 if the zoning enforcement officer determines the two frontages are measured cumulatively. The east facade alone stands at just above 11 percent and is to remain; if the officer determines the facades are separate, that shortfall exceeds the board’s 50-percent waiver ceiling and the applicant must seek relief from the Zoning Board of Appeals. Seconded by David Vitka; carried on a voice vote. No tally was announced and none is audible on the recording.
Relief from the design standard that changes in material occur at inside corners, and that material or color changes not occur at outside corners or within a plane. The applicant sought it for the northwest corner, arguing that the parapet, its clay caps and the rolled roofing coming up from the lower roof leave no inside corner to change at, and that the coping, trim and soffit will wrap the corner and die into the existing block. Roll call: Leiker, Petrocelli, Richards and Vitka in favor; Waterman-Kulpa opposed. Seconded by David Vitka. The subsection letter is read three different ways on the recording — G6B, G6P and “G6D” — and should be confirmed against the minutes.
Architectural review only; the site plan was approved separately on July 20 and was not reopened. Moved by David Vitka, seconded by Eugene Richards, as submitted — asked whether he wished to attach conditions, the mover did not, and no conditions are audible on the recording, although the chair had just noted that a response to the §239 county referral and some drawing details were still outstanding. Roll call: Leiker, Petrocelli, Richards and Vitka in favor; Chair Waterman-Kulpa opposed, stating for the record that the fiber-cement panel system and its joinery pieces “provide an aesthetic that I do not feel is consistent with the design standards” and that the application “is using materials in a way that they appear to be fake… does not look to be an authentic use of materials.” The design had been tabled twice previously, on June 1 and July 20.
Single combined motion: a waiver of §84-10(A) — “no sign shall obscure, alter or cover the architectural feature of any building” — and approval of the application as submitted for the south elevation only, covering materials, placement and halo lighting, on condition the halo lighting match the colors of the other halo lighting on the building, to be monitored by the village. The sign is 42 square feet and replaces an existing sign in the same location above the entrance doors facing the parking lot. Seconded by Colleen Leiker; carried on a voice vote with the count announced.
The 20.62-square-foot east elevation sign facing Garrison Road. Members held that every other sign on that facade sits in a narrow band below the roofline and that placing this one in the architectural peak is a dramatic and piecemeal change to a building the board would rather see redesigned coherently. Offered the choice of withdrawing, the applicant’s attorney asked to table. Seconded by Colleen Leiker; carried on a voice vote with the count announced. It may return with a revised placement or a whole-facade proposal.
Architectural review and site plan review of an 11-unit, three-story multi-family building on an existing parking lot adjoining the village DPW parcel. Handled as a high-level sketch-plan review; no motion was made, seconded or voted on either item. Board direction: break up the facade rhythm; treat the south elevation as a primary facade rather than seek relief from it; resolve the parking encroachment onto the village parcel (a pre-existing condition traced to a 2018 approval drawn against an incorrect property line, now requiring a Village Board easement); provide an accessible route and relocate an accessible unit nearer accessible parking; address refuse access; bury and locate site utilities; define sidewalks. Variances remain pending at the ZBA, including first-floor ceiling height (15 feet required, 10 shown, 12 discussed as a possible waiver).
Architectural review and site plan review of a 40-unit, three-story elevator building with 60 parking spaces on an irregular lot. Handled as sketch-plan review; no motion was made, seconded or voted on either item. Board direction: the same facade-repetition critique; calculate transparency between three and ten feet; screen along South Long Street; narrow the curb cut while preserving fire access; light a dark corner of the rear fire lane without wall packs; retain the five trees on the north line; resolve the boundary fence at the Walgreens[*] lot; locate the meter wall, transformer, snow storage and buried utilities on the plans. The site will undergo a Phase I environmental site assessment because of prior use. The village Environmental Advisory Council filed vegetation comments; the Traffic Safety Committee discussed queuing during events at the athletic facility opposite but generated no formal recommendation.
The board’s review of its own Rules of Procedure, tabled 6–0 on July 20, was set aside again. No motion was made and no vote taken; the chair proposed holding it because two members were absent, no one objected, and members were asked to review the recirculated draft before the next meeting.
Moved and seconded after the chair confirmed no further business; carried on a voice vote with no count announced. The printed agenda schedules the next work session for 6:30 p.m. and the next regular meeting for 7 p.m. on Monday, October 5, 2026; the chair announced “October 6th” from the table.
Capture, and what is missing from it. This brief is built from an automated transcription of the village’s meeting stream — 100.9 minutes, faster-whisper “medium,” 1,470 segments, language confidence p=0.99 — cross-checked against the posted September 8 agenda. The 6:30 p.m. work session is not in the capture. The agenda schedules one; the recording that came down opens with the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the 7 p.m. regular meeting and runs to adjournment. A second stream posted for the same meeting yielded no audio at all. Nothing in the available record establishes whether the work session was held, and no work-session content is reported here. The first transcription pass crashed partway and was rerun; the completed pass is the one used. The recording carries no speaker labels, so quotations are attributed by role and context except where a name is spoken on the roll or a member is addressed by name.
Names. Board members and village staff are drawn from the roster verified against the board’s June 1, 2026 minutes and are stated normally. This agenda’s roll-call block names the same seven members — Leiker, Pacer, Petrocelli, Richards, Stone, Vitka, Waterman-Kulpa — with Grieco (Village Attorney), Boeck (Building & Zoning Clerk), Palumbo (Amherst Planning) and Hahn/Meyer (trustee liaison) in the departments block. On the recording, the attorney is answered “not yet” at roll call, one further staff response is indistinct, and no response is audible for the Amherst planner or the liaison; members referred to both the planner and the Building & Zoning Clerk in the third person all evening and directed the applicants to follow up with them. Applicant representatives appear only in the audio and are left unnamed here pending the minutes — the 5630 Main Street architect (a first name only, rendered “Cora”), the sign consultant for 5759 Main Street, and the South Long Street team, whose attorney, developer entity, engineer and architect are rendered in the transcript as “Ruff Falls Crafts,” “Rockville Development,” “Eric Andrews” and “Dan McKinnon” of “Camino Wood.” None of those could be confirmed against any official document and none is asserted here. Benderson Development[*] is carried for the 5759 Main Street applicant: the audio renders it “undersea development,” and the village record identifies Benderson as the applicant on that plaza from the board’s June 1 review onward.
Street validation. The Village of Williamsville sits inside the Town of Amherst, so its streets are carried on the Town’s inventory rather than a separate Village list; street_check.py was run against that list. It extracted three street references — Garrison Road, Main Street and Village Square Lane — and all three matched exactly, with nothing flagged suggest, ambiguous or unknown. That clean result understates the work, because the tool only captures phrases carrying a street-type word, and this meeting’s central street never carries one on the recording. A manual pass against the same inventory resolved three bare-form references: “south long,” “South Lawn” and “south along” are all South Long Street (the agenda abbreviates it “So. Long”); “Evans” is Evans Street; and “California” is California Drive. All three are on the Town list and all three corrections are applied. No out-of-town street was mangled into an in-town one, and one further reference — a neighboring building the board recalled approving, rendered “20 and all” and most likely a South Long Street address — is left unstated rather than guessed at. That the tool silently passes a transcript containing dozens of unsuffixed references to its most important street is a gap in the tool, not a clean bill of health.
Reconciling the July 20 brief. Two things in this publication’s July 20 coverage need adjusting. First, that brief described the Ellicott Creek stone wall as already “a designated local landmark.” It was not and is not: the Historic Preservation Commission voted only on August 25 to nominate it, and the Board of Trustees, which alone can designate, has not acted. The July analysis of jurisdiction — that reconstruction needs DEC, likely Army Corps and a SHPO consultation — stands; the word “designated” did not. Second, the 5630 Main Street architecture that brief reported as tabled has now been approved, and the Rules of Procedure it reported as tabled remain untouched.
Dates and code citations. The posted agenda heads this meeting “Monday, September 8, 2026.” September 8 fell on a Tuesday; the board’s regular Monday slot was Labor Day, and the weekday in the agenda header is an error, not a rescheduling. The chair used “Monday” too. For the next meeting the agenda says Monday, October 5 and the chair said October 6; the agenda is followed here. Code sections are reported as the board read them; the material-change subsection under §112-16-G(6) is read three different ways on the recording and is left at the subsection level.
Convention. [*] marks a proper noun, address or parcel identifier taken from audio and not confirmed by an official document, or silently corrected from a likely transcription error. Verify against the official Village Clerk’s record before quoting in any formal communication.