Village of Williamsville Zoning Board of Appeals·September 16, 2026
One Unit Over the Threshold · Six Variances, No Vote · A Parking Lot on Village Land · The Hearing Stays Open
The Zoning Board of Appeals opened a public hearing Wednesday night on six area variances for two apartment buildings on South Long Street — and was told, before the applicant reached the microphone, that it could not vote on any of them. The 11-unit building proposed at 26 South Long Street and the 40-unit building at 55 add to 51 apartments, one more than the 50-unit ceiling that applies to a project sitting substantially next to publicly owned parkland, which makes the pair a Type I action under the state environmental review law and requires a coordinated review nobody had started. “Had I done the coordinated review previously, we might be further along,” the Town of Amherst planner who staffs the village's land-use boards, Gary Palumbo, told the board — having found the problem himself while reviewing this very application. One request, relief from the primary-facade rule on the Village Square Lane side of 26 South Long, was withdrawn at the microphone; the applicant expects a second to evaporate once the Planning Board settles what screening it wants. The board spent the remaining fifty minutes on things it cannot fix: a parking lot at 26 South Long built years ago across the property line onto village Department of Public Works land, which only the Village Board can sell or ease; a code that sets a maximum side yard of 40 feet against a plan showing 62 to 137; a required two-foot parking setback the drawings render as negative six; and a parking ratio the applicant justified with the phrase his own client had ordered him to stop using eight days earlier. No motion was made on any variance. The hearing was left open by consensus, with no vote. No motion to adjourn appears on the recording. The June 17 minutes were approved on a voice vote with no tally announced. Next meeting: October 21.
The Zoning Board of Appeals had not met since June 17. It came back on Wednesday to the biggest residential proposal in the village — two apartment buildings on South Long Street, filed as one application with six area-variance requests attached — and the first thing the chair did, before opening the hearing, was hand the floor to staff to explain why the evening would end without a decision.
“We've had a little glitch,” Chair Richard Andrews said, on whether the project is a Type I action under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, a Type II, or unlisted. Gary Palumbo, the Town of Amherst planner who sits with the village's land-use boards, had written his staff report on September 3 and flagged it there. Because the site is substantially contiguous to the village park across the street, the state's environmental rules cut the applicable residential threshold to a quarter of its normal size — 25 percent of 200 units. “Twenty-five percent is 50,” Palumbo told the board. “This is 51.”
Eleven units at 26 South Long Street plus forty at 55 make fifty-one, and fifty-one makes the whole thing a Type I action: a full environmental assessment form, a coordinated review among every board with an approval to give, and a lead agency designated before anybody votes on anything. None of that had happened, because the project's only prior appearance — before the Planning Board on September 8 — was a sketch-plan review. “I was not thinking about SEQR for sketch plan, and I did not put this in front of the planning board,” Palumbo said. “Had I done the coordinated review previously, we might be further along.”
The list of agencies then grew in real time. Palumbo had already written to the Planning Board proposing it as lead agency, with Erie County planning as an interested party. Mid-sentence, he added one more: “I just thought of somebody else, because we're talking about an easement.” The parking lot at 26 South Long sits partly on village land, which makes the Village Board an involved agency too. “So based on that, we cannot decide anything this evening.”
The chair held the hearing anyway. An attorney who gave his name as Mark Ramanowski[*], appearing for a developer the recording renders as Rockville Development[*], walked the six requests parcel by parcel “to keep the record clear,” then withdrew one of them outright: the request for relief from the primary-facade requirement on the Village Square Lane frontage of 26 South Long. Productive talks with the Planning Board, he said, mean “we don't believe a variance will be necessary for that as well. So we can knock that one off.” He expects the side-yard screening request to go the same way, but asked to leave it on the table until the Planning Board decides what it wants — a hedge the board let stand without much enthusiasm.
Nobody in the audience asked to speak for or against. The board asked questions for forty minutes, the applicant answered them, and then, having been told twice it could not act, the board did not act. The hearing was left open to October 21 on a nod. “I would suggest keeping the public hearing open either way,” Palumbo had said at the start — revised drawings are coming, and some of these variances may not survive them.
Nothing about the 51st unit is architecturally significant. It is significant because of arithmetic in the state's environmental rules, and the sequence it triggers is worth following.
The practical upshot for a reader: nothing was denied, nothing was granted, and the applicant lost a month, not a project. The Planning Board is expected to take lead agency at its next meeting, and this board can act once the determination is filed.
The oddest request on the docket asks this board to forgive a setback that does not exist. The parking lot behind 26 South Long Street was built, at some point in the past, straight across the property line and onto the adjoining village Department of Public Works parcel. The village code wants parking held two feet off that line. The plans, as drawn, show it six feet on the wrong side of it.
“I don't know how you'd grant a negative setback,” the applicant's attorney said, proposing that the request be recast as a zero-foot setback on either side of the line. Palumbo did not disagree so much as explain what he had been trying to illustrate: “Not only are you not meeting the setback, but… you're encroaching on the neighboring project.” The village attorney drew the boundary of this board's power around it — the Zoning Board “isn't approving a site plan for you to build on the neighboring property.”
The applicant's position is that nothing is being built there: the lot exists, it is not being torn up, and no physical change is proposed along that line. The staff position is that a variance application reopens everything. “This is not a parking lot project. That was a separate project,” Palumbo said. “You're starting over again. It's a new project. So everything has to meet the new rules.”
Which brought the evening to the more interesting archaeology. When that lot's last site plan was approved, Palumbo reminded the board, it carried screening along the street — that old plan was in the members' packets. The screening was never installed. Neither, it turns out, was the property line respected. Two pieces of a single approval simply never happened, and both surfaced only because a developer came back in 2026 asking for something new.
Fixing it is not this board's job. The village owns the strip, so the remedy is an easement or an outright sale, negotiated with the Village Board. Members wanted to know which, and what happens if the village later disposes of the parcel. “My biggest fear would be the fact that it would be sold,” one said. The applicant was blunt about his preference: “I personally think an acquisition makes more sense. It's cleaner.” The village attorney's read of the discussion so far was that it has been about an easement, not a sale — and that either way, “if we're going to seek it, it's going to be a permanence.” Palumbo closed the meeting saying he would revise his lead-agency letter and get it to the Village Board “in anticipation of actually having a decision on the easement.”
A variance attaches to the property, not the owner. Once granted, it survives the sale of the house or the lot; the next owner inherits both the relief and any condition written into it. That is why boards labor over condition language, and why this board on June 17 tied a 5800 Main Street grant to landscaping “as shown on the site plan.”
An easement is the same idea, on somebody else's land. A permanent easement runs with the land and binds whoever buys it next; a license or a revocable permission does not. That distinction is the whole of the members' worry about the DPW strip, and it is the Village Board's to resolve, not this one's.
Enforcement is the soft spot. Told a condition could require oversized vehicles to park at the wide north end, a member answered plainly: “There's basically no enforcement of that.” A violation has to be seen, documented and referred; the building department's practical remedy is a phone call to the management company. A condition is a promise recorded against a deed, not a patrol.
The first request on the printed agenda — §112-16B(2)(h), 55 South Long Street — is captioned “minimum side yard Setback.” It is not. The applicant caught it at the microphone: the code sets a maximum side yard of 40 feet in the mixed-use district, and the plan proposes somewhere between 62 and 137 feet. “That's cut and pasted,” someone at the table conceded. The arithmetic in the staff report was right; the label was wrong.
Then a member asked the obvious question, and the room came up empty. Why does the village cap a side yard at all? “I don't know,” the village attorney said. “I honestly did not realize we had a maximum,” a member admitted. The answer the table assembled between them: the mixed-use district is written to pull buildings up toward one another and toward the sidewalk — “to encourage a consistent street wall and not have strip plazas.”
That answer opened the evening's real argument, and it was not about any variance. If the district's purpose is a Main Street of shopfronts and pedestrians, a member asked, what is it doing to a side street of apartment blocks? “All the presentation is that it's mixed use because there's a variety of residential housing types,” he said — not ground-floor commercial with offices above. “We're just having different types of residential.” The reply from staff was crisp: “A mixed use district does not require a mixed use building.”
He kept going, and it is the most quotable passage of the night. “There's not a yard for the kids of tenants to play in on this property. It's a parking lot and a street out front. And that's it.” So when the board is asked to waive a landscape island in order to save a parking space, he said, “we're going to make the decision that we prefer parking to a landscaped island” — in a district sold to the village on the promise of vibrancy. He conceded he was leaning toward granting it anyway.
Palumbo's answer to that was the cleanest statement of institutional role heard at a Williamsville board this month. “When I'm doing my review, I don't get to say this is a misplaced piece of code. Maybe it should only apply on Main Street. I don't get to say that.” But the member could: “We're going through the comprehensive plan and the zoning ongoing now. Make those comments.” The village's Comprehensive Plan Update Committee next meets September 23.
The screening request produced the sharpest exchange. A member read the code aloud to herself and could not see the problem: side-yard parking “is supposed to be screened from the road,” the people who wrote the code “were very specific” about brick or an equivalent, “and they don't like side yard parking.” So why not just build it? “I don't see any thing prohibiting you from putting that something there.” The village attorney narrowed the question to what is actually in front of this board: the code leaves the design of a screen to the Planning Board, so “the only thing that they could seek from this board is to say, I don't want to provide any screening at all.” “Well, that's what he's asking for,” a member said. The applicant declined to withdraw it and said he would work it out at the Planning Board first.
Parking consumed the rest. The village requires 1.5 spaces per unit; 26 South Long shows 17 for 11 units, and 55 shows 60 for 40. The applicant volunteered that his own demand figures run closer to one space per unit — “we could get by on less” — and then explained why in a way that stopped the room. Asked whether nobody in the buildings would own two cars, he answered: “Yeah, not in workforce housing.” A member circled back a minute later: “What did you call the housing?” “Workforce housing.”
Eight days earlier, at the Planning Board, the same attorney used the same phrase about the same building and was cut off inside two seconds by his own side: “Sorry to interrupt… Multi-family for rent. That's really what we're doing. So we're not going to talk about workforce. We're not going to talk about any of that.” At the Zoning Board he said it twice, unprompted, and used it to argue that a code-required parking ratio overstates what the tenants will actually need. Nobody at the Zoning Board table objected to the term; the discussion moved to bus routes.
And there was the pickup truck. Alternate William Tuyn, called on first and addressed all night as Bill, arrived from a trip past a YMCA lot where extended-cab trucks backed into 9-by-19-foot spaces were overhanging the sidewalk completely. Five spaces at the pinched south end of 26 South Long fall to about 17 feet deep, squeezed by a 26-foot fire lane the fire code wants kept clear. Could the landlord steer big vehicles north and compact ones south? “That's a great idea,” the attorney said — signage, paint, whatever. It was a member who supplied the deflating coda about enforcement.
Wednesday's hearing turned repeatedly on which body gets to say yes. Four different doors were open in one room:
One consequence readers should hold onto: a Zoning Board decision on an area variance is final — it is not a recommendation to the trustees and nobody upstairs ratifies it. The only route past it is an Article 78 proceeding in State Supreme Court, within 30 days of filing. That finality is exactly why the board would not vote on Wednesday.
Two things were live in Williamsville on Wednesday night that a reader following this village would reasonably expect to hear in a variance hearing. Neither was mentioned, and in both cases the silence is worth recording precisely.
The demolition moratorium. Two days earlier, on September 14, the Board of Trustees voted to notice a public hearing for October 13 on a proposed local law imposing a village-wide moratorium on the issuance of demolition permits. The measure's draft text is not in the trustees' agenda packet; its duration, its exemptions and even its local-law number are unstated. The words demolition and moratorium do not appear anywhere in Wednesday's 54 minutes. On the record as it stands, nothing establishes that any of the three South Long Street parcels needs a demolition permit — 26 South Long is described throughout as an existing parking lot, and no structure to be removed was identified at either board. But the timing is not academic: this applicant intends to file a formal site-plan application “in the next week or so,” returns here October 21, and the hearing on the moratorium falls on October 13, between the two. A law noticed on the 14th cannot bind anybody on the 16th, and this brief does not suggest it does. It does mean the question of whether these buildings can be built and anything on those lots taken down may be governed by a rule that does not exist yet.
The wall nomination. On August 25 the Historic Preservation Commission nominated the East Side Ellicott Creek Stone Retaining Wall as a village landmark, a step that bars four private owners — 5630 Main Street and 16, 20 and 26 Mill Street[*] — from altering the wall until the Board of Trustees rules. The trustees have now left it off three consecutive agendas. It has no connection to this docket, and the point of saying so is to head off a collision of house numbers: 26 Mill Street is one of the four frozen parcels; 26 South Long Street, on this week's docket, is a different property on a different street and is not affected by the nomination. No parcel before the Zoning Board on Wednesday is covered by it, and the words landmark, historic, preservation, nomination and Mill Street appear zero times in the transcript. The one time the word “wall” is spoken all night, it means a street wall — the line of building faces the mixed-use code is written to create.
This was the Zoning Board's first meeting since June 17, ninety-one days earlier, and the only business on the agenda besides the minutes was 2026-ZBA-06. The board approved the June 17 minutes on a voice vote — moved by Patricia Fulwiler, seconded by William Tuyn, “all in favor,” “carried.” No count was called and none is audible, so this brief does not report one. Old Business on the printed agenda reads “None.”
One line of the docket produced nothing at all. The case is captioned “26, 31, 55 S. Long,” but every one of the six lettered requests beneath it names only 26 or 55. 31 South Long Street was never mentioned aloud. The Planning Board's September 8 docket paired “31 & 55 So. Long” as a single project, which suggests 31 is part of the larger building's assemblage rather than a separate application, but nothing said Wednesday confirms that and this brief does not assert it. It is a question for the revised plans.
The meeting also ends untidily. The recording runs 54.2 minutes and stops with staff still discussing the lead-agency letter; there is no motion to adjourn on it, and none is reported here. The village's standing calendar schedules a ZBA work session at 7 p.m. before the 7:30 meeting on the third Wednesday; the capture is a single continuous file that begins with the roll call, and no work-session content is available. The next regular meeting is Wednesday, October 21, at which the public hearing resumes.
Five seats were filled and all five answered the roll: Chair Richard Andrews, members Christine Petrie, Patricia Fulwiler and Shawn Lemay, and alternate William Tuyn. Matthew Carlson, the board's other alternate, is not named in the agenda's roll-call block and did not answer. Village Attorney Chip Grieco, trustee liaison Steven Meyer, Building & Zoning Clerk Carol Boeck and Amherst planner Gary Palumbo all answered from the departments block. No recusals were declared and none appears to have been required. The board's only vote of the night was taken by voice with no count announced; where no tally exists, this brief says so rather than inferring unanimity. Every docketed request is listed below, including the five that drew no motion, so that nothing on the agenda vanishes from the record.
Moved by member Patricia Fulwiler, seconded by alternate William Tuyn, immediately after the roll call. The chair asked “all in favor,” took the ayes, asked for opposed, and declared it carried. No vote count was announced and none is audible on the recording, so no tally is reported. The June 17 meeting was the board's previous session; there were no July or August meetings.
Opened from the chair, with no motion required. Before opening it the chair yielded to Amherst planner Gary Palumbo, who reported that the combined 51-unit project is a Type I action under SEQR — the applicable 200-unit residential threshold being reduced to 50 because the site is substantially contiguous to publicly owned parkland — and that a coordinated review had not been conducted. The Planning Board is proposed as lead agency; Erie County planning is an interested party; the Village Board was identified during the meeting as a third involved agency because of the parking easement. The chair announced at the outset of the presentation that no decision would be made: “Actually, this particular case, we won't make a decision this evening.” The applicant waived the reading of the public notice. No member of the public spoke for or against.
The mixed-use district sets a maximum side yard of 40 feet; the plan shows between 62 and 137 feet on the south end of an irregular, pinched lot. The applicant flagged the agenda caption as a cut-and-paste error and the arithmetic in the staff report as correct. Asked why the code caps a side yard, the village attorney answered “I don't know” and a member said “I honestly did not realize we had a maximum”; the explanation assembled at the table was that the district is written to produce a consistent street wall rather than strip plazas. No motion was made, seconded or voted.
The only request touching both parcels: screening for side-yard parking on the South Long Street frontage at 55 and the Village Square Lane frontage at 26. The code requires screening between side-yard parking and the street but leaves its design to the Planning Board, so the village attorney framed the only thing this board could grant as permission to provide no screening at all. Members were unconvinced — “I don't see why they can't meet that part of the code” — and Palumbo noted that the previously approved site plan for 26 South Long carried screening that was never installed. The applicant declined to withdraw, asking to keep it “on the table” pending the Planning Board's design direction, and said he expects it will ultimately prove unnecessary. No motion was made, seconded or voted.
Withdrawn by the applicant at the microphone, before any board discussion: “Ultimately we're going to withdraw that particular request… we don't believe a variance will be necessary for that as well. So we can knock that one off.” The attorney credited talks with the Planning Board over facade treatments on the Village Square Lane elevation. A member later pressed on whether the Planning Board could waive the requirement instead and was told flatly that it could not — “That is not a waiver. We need a variance for that” — so the request could return if the revised elevations fall short. The board took no action on the withdrawal; none was required.
The code requires a two-foot parking setback from the property line. The existing rear lot was built across the line onto the village Department of Public Works parcel, which the plans depict as a negative six-foot setback. The applicant asked that it be recast as a zero-foot setback on either side of the line — “I don't know how you'd grant a negative setback” — and argued nothing physical is changing. Staff replied that a new project must meet current rules regardless of what was built before. The village attorney noted this board cannot approve construction on a neighbor's land. Resolution requires an easement or a sale from the Village Board, which would also make the trustees an involved agency for SEQR. No motion was made, seconded or voted.
The code requires a landscaped island with curbing where more than ten parking spaces run uninterrupted. The applicant said installing one would cost a space and drop the lot below the code-required 1.5 spaces per unit, and chose to seek relief from the island rather than from the parking count. The trade was the evening's clearest philosophical flashpoint: a member objected that the board would be choosing “parking to a landscaped island” on a site with no yard, while conceding he was “leaning towards the need for the parking.” Members also explored whether shared parking between the two sites could free up a space and moot the request. No motion was made, seconded or voted.
Roughly five spaces at the southeast end of the lot fall to about 17 feet deep, a consequence of holding a 26-foot fire lane open through an oddly shaped lot that widens toward the rear. The applicant said the plans overstate the problem and undertook to identify the affected spaces specifically on the revised drawings. A member raised the practical hazard — extended-cab pickups overhanging a sidewalk at a nearby YMCA lot with standard 9-by-19 spaces — and asked whether oversized vehicles could be steered to the deeper north end by signage or striping, a condition the applicant welcomed and a member doubted anyone would enforce. No motion was made, seconded or voted.
Continued by consensus after the applicant confirmed he had nothing further to present. No motion was made, no second offered and no vote taken; the chair asked “does it leave the public hearing open, or do we?” and the answer from the table was “yeah, I think that makes sense here.” Palumbo had recommended holding it open regardless of SEQR, since revised plans were coming and some requests may be withdrawn. The hearing resumes at the board's next regular meeting, Wednesday, October 21, 2026.
The 54.2-minute recording ends at roughly 53 minutes and 30 seconds with staff discussing the lead-agency letter, the easement's path to the Village Board, and the sequence by which the Planning Board would accept lead agency and issue a single negative declaration for the other boards to affirm. No motion to adjourn, and no vote on one, is audible. The board's practice on June 17 was to adjourn by motion and voice vote, so its absence here is most likely a capture artifact rather than a procedural one; it is reported as unrecorded rather than assumed. The agenda's Miscellaneous item produced nothing on the recording.
This brief is built from an automated transcription of the village's meeting recording — 54.2 minutes, faster-whisper “medium,” 1,020 segments, language confidence p=0.99 — cross-checked against the official September 16, 2026 Zoning Board of Appeals agenda. The agenda is authoritative here for the case number, the docket order, the addresses and every code citation; where the audio and the agenda disagree, the agenda is followed.