Village of Williamsville Village Board·August 10, 2026
Published Late · The Landmark Hearing Closes · An Expert Report and a Hound Dog · A Developer Names Names · A 15-Year-Old Asks for a Camera Ban
The continued public hearing on landmarking the Fogel Insurance Building at 13 South Cayuga Road consumed 85 of this meeting's 98 minutes and ended, as it began in July, without a vote — but not before the record acquired its sharpest material. The owner's preservation consultant, KTA Preservation Specialists, spent 27 minutes dismantling the village-commissioned survey that had found the building met all four landmark criteria, calling it a planning tool whose four checkmarks rest on analysis of two; preservation commissioner Anthony Bannon answered with 22 minutes on George “Hound Dog” Lorenz, the rock-and-roll disc jockey who broadcast from the building in 1958; HPC co-chair Susan Fenster said WUFO's owner had been “enthusiastic” when they met in March and asked the board to draw its own conclusions about the July letter withdrawing the station's name; and developer James Zaepfel closed the hearing by saying he had called that owner himself, that she remembered it differently, and by laying out a dated timeline in which he accused the mayor and the commission's vice-chair of pursuing the designation to stop his company. No one on the dais responded. The board closed the hearing on a voice vote; the designation was decided three weeks later, on August 31. Around it: $588,345.52 in payroll and vouchers, Local Law #3 on unsafe sidewalks adopted, the $1.35 million interfund clean-up tabled for wording, four HPC members reappointed through 2030 in an off-agenda motion, Shawn Lemay returned to the ZBA through 2031, a Beautification Committee seat filled — and a 15-year-old resident asking the board to ban automated license-plate readers inside the village. Trustee Amy Jackson was absent.
When the board held this hearing open on July 13, the stated reason was time to read a document: the South Cayuga and Main Historic Resource Evaluation, a survey the village commissioned from Preservation Studios, with fieldwork on May 8 and completion in June, whose summary table put a checkmark under all four of the code's landmark criteria for 13 South Cayuga. On August 10 the owner's side came back with a reading of it. Carrie Traynor[*], who identified herself as president and principal investigator of KTA Preservation Specialists, read a prepared response for 27 minutes, and its architecture matters more than any single line.
First, the sequence. By KTA's account the Historic Preservation Commission nominated the building on February 3 as “an intact example of mid-century post-war commercial architecture”; KTA answered February 19 that the architectural criterion was not met; the HPC amended its application March 17 to add the WUFO association and recast the architecture as a local hybrid of modern commercial and Colonial Revival; KTA answered again April 22; the HPC amended a second time May 26; KTA answered May 27; and the village then commissioned the survey, whose May 8 fieldwork “post-dates the commission's first two applications” and KTA's objections to them. There is nothing improper in supplementing a nomination, she said, but the survey “should not be treated as an independent corroboration merely because the same conclusion appears in a separate document.”
Second, what the survey is. A preservation survey, she argued, citing National Park Service guidance, is “a planning and identification tool” — evidence a board may weigh, not a designation finding. And the four checkmarks, she said, overstate the document: the property-specific discussion addresses only Criteria 1 and 3, the same two the HPC's May nomination relied on, and offers “no developed analysis under Criteria 2 or 4.” Then criterion by criterion: WUFO occupied second-floor office space for roughly six years, 1962 to 1968, before 45 years at 89 LaSalle Avenue and its current home at 143 Broadway, which houses a museum of the station; nothing in the building's fabric conveys the association; and Sheila L. Brown, WUFO's manager and principal owner and head of the WUFO Black Radio History Collective, has asked in writing, dated July 8, that the station's “name and legacy not be used to support the designation.” Her objection “is not a veto,” Traynor said, but the board should not “assume that designation of this particular building necessarily honors WUFO.” On architecture, the survey's four-paragraph section on a local Colonial Revival tradition names “no dates, no architects or builders, and no documented local examples,” while its own appendix lists three comparables — Village Hall, the library and bank block at 5571–5583 Main, and 5543–5545 Main — without saying whether 13 South Cayuga represents the type better than any of them. KTA's conclusion: none of the four criteria is shown.
The property owner's attorney, who gave his name as Ari Goldberg[*], standing in for colleague Cory Hauer[*], made the legal point in 90 seconds: “We don't have a case of countervailing expert reports.” The survey, he said, is not an expert report on the specific criteria; KTA's is. “It is therefore the only expert report in the record for this board.”
Board: Mayor Christine Hunt (presiding); Deputy Mayor James Celeste; Trustees Jeffrey Hahn and Steven Meyer. Absent: Trustee Amy Jackson. Staff: Deputy Clerk Kathryn Rappleye; DPW Crew Chief Ben Vilonen answered from the floor. Administrator Nick McCormick's absence was implied when a resolution was tabled for his explanation. The Pledge was led by a fire chief the audio renders “Bulbul.”[*]
Hearing speakers (8): two residents for; KTA Preservation Specialists against; HPC members Bannon and Fenster for; resident Eileen Torrey[*] for; the owner's attorney against; James Zaepfel against.
Open floor (2): Andrea and Bob Duke, 25 Mill Street; Matthew, 15.
Chapter 47 of the village code lets the trustees designate a landmark that meets any one of four tests: (1) special character or value in the village's political, economic or social history; (2) identification with significant persons or events; (3) distinguishing architecture, materials or the work of a notable designer; (4) an established and familiar visual feature by unique location or singular physical character. The nomination has moved across them: architecture first, then WUFO's history, then both. The village survey checked all four; the owner's consultant argues the body of the survey supports at most two and that neither is made out. The board's job is not to pick a document but to make its own findings against the four tests — which is why the survey's status as evidence, rather than as a verdict, was the hearing's real subject.
If KTA's case was that the building's history is thin, Anthony Bannon's answer was that the record had been looking at the wrong radio station. Bannon — an HPC member, and by his own account a Buffalo News critic from 1966 to 1985, twice director of the Burchfield Penney Art Center and for 16 years of the George Eastman House — spent 22 minutes on George Lorenz, the disc jockey known as “the Hound,” who quit 50,000-watt WKBW in May 1958 rather than accept a Top 40 playlist and that October put his show on WINE, 1080 AM, at 13 South Cayuga. “George Washington didn't sleep there,” Bannon said. “But George Lorenz, a visionary cultural leader, worked there — not overnight, but for several years.”
The argument was for Criterion 2 by way of biography: Lorenz as one of the first white DJs to play rhythm and blues to a mass audience, a promoter who “brought out” Elvis Presley early, a publisher and syndicator whose howl was borrowed by Wolfman Jack, a curator in all but title — “you give that description to museum people, give it the dignity” — and a mentor to Robbie Robertson, who took a bus from Toronto at 15 to stand outside the Zanzibar and listen. Bannon put himself in the building: a Williamsville high-schooler in 1958 who sat with a classmate in the outer room watching Lorenz through the plate glass under the “On Air” light. WINE's owner, he noted, was John Kluge, whose station-by-station empire became Metromedia and, in 1981, the seed of Fox Television — “a chain with origins here in Williamsville.” When WINE became easy-listening WISL in late 1960 Lorenz left; when the frequency became WUFO in late 1961 he returned briefly as the one white voice in its original line-up. He died in 1972. “I'm tempted to hound-howl for you,” Bannon finished, “but I figure I'll just trust this board to do the right thing.”
Eileen Torrey[*], a resident, followed with the WUFO case in its plainest form — “the first Black-owned radio station in Western New York” began here in 1961, and “we cannot recreate the place where that history occurred” — and the architectural one: the 1953 red-brick building as the deliberate partner of the 1927 bank building at 5529 Main Street on the corner. Two residents had opened the hearing on similar ground: one who ran a table at the village's April 2024 visioning workshops and said “the historic character of Williamsville” came up “again and again,” offering the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum and Buffalo's grain elevators as things nobody found beautiful at first; and Ray Harnley[*], whose family once owned the landmarked 19th-century commercial building at 5590 Main, arguing that “just because a building isn't exceptional doesn't mean it's not telling a story.”
The hearing's history runs through a single dial position. WINE, 1080 AM, moved into 13 South Cayuga in 1958 and carried Lorenz's Hound Dog Show; it became WISL in late 1960; in late 1961 the frequency was relaunched as WUFO, whose first programming aired November 2, 1962. KTA's timeline has WUFO in the building's second-floor offices from 1962 to about 1968; Bannon's adds WINE from October 1958. Neither side disputed the other's dates. The dispute was whether six years of one station and two of another, in a building whose interior no longer shows either, are enough to make the address itself historic.
The WUFO owner's July 8 letter has been the hearing's most contested document since it arrived on the day of the July 13 session, and on August 10 two speakers gave the board incompatible accounts of the conversation behind it. Susan Fenster, the HPC's co-chair, speaking as “a journalist and historian” whose Harry Altman biography led her from the Glen Park Casino to WUFO's first DJs, said she met Sheila Brown in person at the station's Broadway offices on March 17, explained the landmarking process, and found her “not merely supportive” but “enthusiastic,” with access to WUFO's 1,500-square-foot museum from which “much of the historical material” in the nomination came. She was “therefore surprised” by the July email declining participation, noted — as co-chair Catherine Waterman-Kulpa had on July 13 — that the attached document's file name was itself notable, and said: “I will not speculate what happened between my meeting with Ms. Brown in March and the arrival of that letter in July. I will simply ask that the record reflect what happened at both ends of that timeline.” The commission, she said, “unanimously concluded this place matters,” and the decision was now the board's.
James Zaepfel of Zaepfel Development, 5505 Main Street — who said again that he does not own 13 South Cayuga and never has — told the board he had telephoned Brown after hearing that account. His version, as he gave it: Fenster came in on March 17, “introduced herself as a historian,” did not say she was on the commission, spoke for 12 to 15 minutes, was told the station had nothing on the address, looked herself and “didn't find much,” and there was no enthusiasm and no follow-up. He said Brown also told him that Waterman-Kulpa and the mayor had each called her separately the week before the July hearing asking for her support, that she declined, and that the mayor had asked a colleague of Brown's at Highmark, at a cookout, to press her to write something in. “If the case for designating this building were as strong as we've been told, would any of that really have been necessary?” He urged the trustees to call Brown themselves. This brief has no independent account of any of these conversations; every version above is a speaker's, and Ms. Brown did not appear.
Zaepfel then read a timeline into the record: January 30, a conversation with the mayor about a vehicle crash at 5511 Main, in which he said she told him “a good developer would find a way to keep that building”; February 3, the nomination letter to Dan Fogel; February 24, the first hearing; February 26, a Comprehensive Plan committee meeting at which, he said, people in Waterman-Kulpa's breakout group later told him she “spent almost that entire session trash-talking me, my family and our business”; March 20, a letter from the mayor saying he had never been appointed to that committee, to which he says he replied with roll calls and agendas bearing his name. He said the proposed South Cayuga district, 13 to 41, “covers every parcel that my company owns on South Cayuga”; that the survey was paid for from the mayor's discretionary funds; that a resident had told an earlier hearing two commissioners said the purpose was “to stop development” and “nobody has denied it”; and that safety-inspection fees — $433,126 in 2003, $65,000 budgeted this year — show what development pays for. “You cannot designate your way out of a sewer bill.” He asked for a no on the landmark and a no on the district. Neither the mayor nor Waterman-Kulpa, who was not at the podium, responded on the recording; the mayor asked whether anyone else wished to speak, and on hearing no one, moved to close the hearing. It carried on a voice vote at 1:33:49.
Andrea and Bob Duke, 25 Mill Street. Since Swan Place was repaved in 2023, they said, the new pavement sits higher than their sidewalk and garage apron on the Swan Place side, so runoff from the Amherst municipal lot and Sorrentino's parking lot “rushes down Swan Place and runs along our sidewalk” — harmless in summer, “thick ice” in winter. They were told last year they were on a repair list and heard nothing since. “What's going to be done about the problem and when?” The DPW crew chief answered from the floor: with mill-and-pave work coming, the plan is to mill in front of the sidewalk and cut a small swale to redirect the water — “before the end of the season, this year.” “Because it was supposed to be done last year,” Mrs. Duke said.
Matthew, 15. A self-described 15-year-old village resident asked the board to act on the Amherst Police Department's Flock automated license-plate-reader network. The village's police officer had confirmed there are no cameras inside village limits, he said, but “we are a one-square-mile village entirely surrounded by Amherst's surveillance grid” and cannot leave for work or school without being “scanned, logged and stored in a permanent database.” He said he had filed a Freedom of Information request with the Town of Amherst for its roughly $300,000 contract and data-sharing agreements and that the town had “completely defaulted on their legal deadlines.” His two asks: that the village formally demand Amherst disclose which outside agencies can access residents' location data, and that it pass a local resolution banning Flock or any ALPR installation inside Williamsville. “Our privacy is non-negotiable.” No trustee responded; the mayor thanked him and asked him to sign in. She then told the room that Tom Frank — a regular at the podium — “is okay,” having been notified that day; “it's a relief.”
Once the hearing closed, the trustees ran the docket in about four minutes. The mayor reported that Glen Park made Buffalo Spree's Best of Buffalo — credit to the volunteers of the joint Amherst–Williamsville board that runs it — and that the 40th annual Moonlight Run would close roads Wednesday at 8 p.m. She moved payroll and vouchers of $588,345.52 for July 13 through August 10 (payroll $64,021.09; general fund $144,217.73; water $190,922.04; sewer $4,125.08; Glen Park $885; trust and agency $4,608.08; sewer slip-lining project $166,886.50; Village Hall renovations $8,430; Island Park restroom water line $4,250) and Local Law #3, Repair of Unsafe Sidewalks, both carried. Her third resolution — the one authorizing Administrator McCormick to permanently write off $1,351,725 the general fund had advanced to five capital projects (the 2022 road project alone $1,190,710; also the Lehigh Valley Section House, the South Cayuga/Milton crosswalk, sewer consolidation and the Garrison Park bath house) — was tabled: “we need further explanation from Administrator McCormick… just some wording at the end.” It passed August 31. Off agenda, the board reappointed four HPC members through the 2030 village year — Patrice Hannotte, Raymond Herman, Patricia Walker and Catherine Waterman-Kulpa — on a voice vote, an hour after two of the commission's members had finished testifying and minutes after a speaker had accused one of the four by name. Deputy Mayor Celeste said traffic and safety was covered in the unbroadcast work session. Trustee Hahn appointed Chris Miller to the Beautification Committee; Trustee Meyer reappointed Shawn Lemay to the Zoning Board of Appeals through 2031. Staff had nothing. Adjourned.
This brief is published six weeks late and out of order (Editor's Note), so its threads are already resolved elsewhere on this page. The 13 South Cayuga designation passed August 31, 3–0, with Trustees Hahn and Meyer abstaining — see that brief. The Due To/From write-off tabled here was adopted the same night. The South Cayuga district Zaepfel opposed had, as of this hearing, no application before the trustees; the commission's next nomination, the East Side Ellicott Creek stone retaining wall, came August 25. The Swan Place swale was promised before season's end; no later meeting on this page has confirmed it. The license-plate-reader request has not appeared on a Village Board agenda since. The July 24 special meeting, whose minutes were approved here, was not captured by this publication.
Every action recorded, in order. Every vote was by voice — motion, second, “all those in favor,” “aye” — with no tally announced and no opposition heard; with four of five trustees present, a carried voice vote is at most 4–0 and is not reported as unanimous. The mayor moved her own resolutions. No recusals were stated. Timecodes are recording positions; the recording opens on the Pledge, so the call to order is not on it.
Three separate motions, each seconded and carried without discussion.
The mayor read the guidelines in full first: one visit to the podium, three minutes, name and residency, remarks to the board as a body; the hearing that followed carried no time limit. Two speakers. Closed at 8:21.
Opened 8:30. Speakers in order: a resident who ran an April 2024 visioning-workshop table (for); Ray Harnley[*] (for); Carrie Traynor[*], KTA Preservation Specialists (against; written copy requested and promised); Anthony Bannon, HPC (for; copies distributed); Eileen Torrey[*] (for; copy taken); Susan Fenster, HPC co-chair (for; copy taken); Ari Goldberg[*] for the property owner (against); James Zaepfel, Zaepfel Development (against; longer written version to be emailed). Motion to close carried 1:33:49. The designation itself was not moved. Flagged as the meeting's substance.
As written in the packet: payroll $64,021.09; general $144,217.73; water $190,922.04; sewer $4,125.08; Glen Park $885.00; trust & agency $4,608.08; sewer slip-lining project $166,886.50; Village Hall renovations $8,430.00; water line, Island Park restrooms $4,250.00.
One-line resolution, no discussion. The law's public hearing preceded this meeting and is not on this recording.
“We need further explanation from Administrator McCormick on that one. Just some wording at the end.” Funds per the packet: 841 Lehigh Valley Section House $13,541; 842 S. Cayuga/Milton three-way crosswalk $24,893; 844 2022 Road Project $1,190,710; 845 Sewer Consolidation $119,889; 846 Garrison Park Bath House $2,692. Adopted August 31.
To take up an item not on the printed agenda (row 8).
Not on the printed agenda; moved by the mayor off agenda. Whisper rendered the names “Hanoi” and “Waterman-Campbell”; the verified HPC roster governs. Flagged because it reappointed, without discussion, the commission that is the applicant in the hearing that had closed three minutes earlier, including the vice-chair named from the podium.
As written.
As written; the agenda titles it a reappointment, the resolution text an appointment. Lemay is on the verified ZBA roster.
No staff reports. “Thank you very much, everyone. Have a good evening.”
Why this brief is six weeks late, and what that changes. The village posted this meeting to its channel's videos tab, not its streams tab, under the title “VB Meeting 8 10 26” — a form the capture rule for this board did not recognize. It sat unclassified until September 22, was recovered and transcribed September 23, and is published here after the August 31 brief that reported the hearing's outcome. This brief is written from the August 10 record alone and does not import what was said later; where the outcome of a thread is known, it is stated in “Where This Sits in the Record” with a pointer to the later brief, not folded into the narrative. The capture rule has been corrected. The August 31 brief's Editor's Note stated that the August 10 meeting “was not captured by this publication”; that is now superseded by this document.
The accusations in the hearing. One speaker made specific claims about the conduct of the mayor and the HPC vice-chair and reported a private conversation with a third party who did not appear. This brief reports those claims as his, in his framing, alongside the HPC co-chair's directly contrary account of the same March 17 meeting, and states that no one on the dais responded on the recording. It does not adjudicate between them. The consultant who read KTA's response, the owner's attorney and his colleague, the two supporting residents, the fire chief and the DPW respondent are identified as the audio renders them, with [*] where no document confirms the name; “Ben” answering the drainage question is consistent with Crew Chief Ben Vilonen on the verified roster. The first hearing speaker's name and street are unintelligible on the recording and are not guessed at. “114 Elk Grove” is most likely Oakgrove Drive; it is left as heard.
Corrections applied. “13 South Lawn,” “South Piavel,” “South Keyuga” and “South Cuyahoga” are all 13 South Cayuga Road. “Zuffold” is Zaepfel and “5505 Bain Street” is 5505 Main Street. “Waterman Coppa / Borderman Coppa / Warneman-Colba / Waterman-Campbell” are Catherine Waterman-Kulpa; “Susan Plaster” is Susan Fenster; “Patrice Hanoi” is Patrice Hannotte; “Deputy Mayor Selec” is Celeste; “Repley” is Rappleye; “Sean Lemay” is Shawn Lemay. “WI&E / W.I.N.E.” is WINE and “Wolf-O” is WUFO. “The Buffalo Loons” is the Buffalo News; “Birdfield Penny” is the Burchfield Penney Art Center. The bank building's name at 5529 Main is not reliably rendered and is omitted. KTA's spoken dates and its account of the nomination's revisions are reported as stated; the July 8 date of Ms. Brown's letter is KTA's, and Zaepfel gave July 10.
Other checks. Street validation ran against the Town of Amherst inventory (the village has no separate list): Main Street, Mill Street, South Cayuga Road and Swan Place matched; Bates Street and LaSalle Avenue are Buffalo streets in Bannon's history and were left alone. Resolution texts and every dollar figure come from the posted packet. The interests watchlist was checked; no match. Trustee Jackson's absence is from the roll call and the mayor's statement; no reason was given.