Williamsville Planning & Architectural Review Board·June 1, 2026
Two Applications, One Long Night · The Barrier Fight · Mansard, Coming Down · Benderson Approved
The Planning & Architectural Review Board spent most of its June 1 meeting on a single project — the restaurant redevelopment of 5630 Main Street, a tight corner lot where Main meets Mill Street beside the creek — and tabled it, twice, sending the applicant's engineer back with a long punch list. The board worked the site plan first: it rejected the applicant's request for a “no-through-traffic” designation across the shared drive to the north (a debate that got heated enough that one member asked to “bring the temperature down”), and pressed for a real landscaped barrier there, stormwater swales, a proper refuse-enclosure detail, screening to keep patio litter out of the creek, and rooftop mechanical screening. Then it moved to architectural review, where the plan drew a warmer reception: the building's failing simulated mansard is to come down, replaced by a built-in-place stucco sign band scored to echo the porcelain panels the mid-1950s structure wore for most of its life. Both parts — the architecture and the site plan — were tabled 7-0 to let the plans be revised and required variances pursued at the Zoning Board. The board also cleared a second, smaller application, approving Benderson Development's storefront-glazing plan for 5759 Main Street 6-0 with conditions, and adopted its May 4 minutes.
The chair opened the evening by going out of order to take up 5630 Main Street, and the board stayed on it most of the night. The project is a redevelopment of a small, constrained corner parcel where Main Street meets Mill Street, hard against the creek at the rear, for restaurant use. The engineer presenting it — Jason Burford of Greenman-Pedersen Inc. (GPI) — told the board the plan had already cleared the village's Traffic & Safety Committee and Environmental Advisory Council reviews and now sought a set of waivers to make a difficult site work. It reads throughout as a food establishment: outdoor patio seating, grease traps inside, garbage totes, a napkins-in-the-creek worry that recurred all night.
Most of the site-plan hour was the board walking the plan foot by foot. Landscaping came up first: the applicant asked to waive the required five-foot buffers on two edges, and the board pushed back, wanting planting beds doubling as drainage swales along Mill Street. That mattered because, as the engineer conceded, there is “no storm drain on Mill Street within 100 feet” and none on Main; water off the patio grades toward the street and, in a heavy storm, toward the creek. The board wanted it slowed and soaked in, not sheeted off.
Then came the refuse enclosure, and the recurring anxiety about the creek at the lot's edge. The tote pad sits perhaps ten feet from the water, and the board wanted an enclosure detail sturdy enough to “stop a garbage truck from going into the creek,” with the gate door-swings drawn and the pad designed to accept a future dumpster. Beyond it runs a village pipe-rail fence along the water — installed, members thought, by the state DOT when the bridge was redone about a decade ago — and the board asked for screening on it so that napkins and food scraps from the patio don't blow straight into the water. The applicant preferred attaching screening to the existing rail rather than raising a six-foot fence that would wall off diners' view of the creek.
When the walk-through was done, the board did vote — not to approve, but to table. It tabled the architectural review 7-0 (moved by the chair, seconded by member Walter Pacer) and the site plan 7-0 (moved by the chair, seconded by member Tom Petrocelli), sending the applicant back to revise the plans and to pursue the required variances at the Zoning Board of Appeals before returning. The evening had opened with its one clean approval, the May 4 minutes, seconded by member Wes Stone.
Williamsville's board is a combined Planning & Architectural Review Board: in one sitting it reviews both a project's site plan (parking, drainage, buffers, refuse, access) and its architecture (materials, facade, signage). That's why 5630 Main Street was walked through twice on June 1 — site plan first, then “architectural review” — and drew two separate motions on the same evening.
Design review is iterative. A board can approve, deny, or — as here — table the item, a formal vote to set it aside so the applicant can revise. Tabling both parts 7-0 does not mean the project stalled or died; it means the applicant leaves with a list, pursues its variances at the Zoning Board, and comes back with revised drawings. Watch for the actual approval (or a formal denial) at a future meeting.
The sharpest exchange of the night was over a strip of pavement along the north property line, where the site connects to the neighbor's lot. The applicant wanted to leave it open under a “no-through-traffic” designation with minimal barrier, arguing an emergency vehicle might need that escape route off a site the engineer called extremely difficult to access. The board was unmoved. Traffic-and-safety had already flagged that drivers would use the gap to dodge the hard left turn out of the lot, and members said flatly the no-through designation was “not going to fly” — on private property, it wouldn't be police-enforceable anyway.
It got personal before it got resolved. The engineer invoked ambulances stuck behind event-night traffic — “if it was my mother's life … every minute counts” — and a board member answered that the code requires only one way in and out for this site, that fire crews can clear low obstacles, and that “if they feel it's unsafe … they shouldn't operate that night.” With the temperature high, a member asked everyone to “bring the temperature down,” and the board landed on the code's answer: a five-foot perimeter buffer — curbing plus landscaping, possibly as simple as grass, along the north boundary, with maybe a small gap left so the neighbor can still reach its building for maintenance. The applicant agreed to redesign to that.
A waiver is the board's permission to relax a specific code requirement when a site can't reasonably meet it. Applicants request them; the board grants or denies each on the merits. At 5630 Main the requests included the five-foot landscape buffers on two edges and the Main Street transparency minimum (below). A waiver is not a variance — that's the Zoning Board's tool; this is the Planning board's own latitude within the site-plan code. The board can also attach conditions, or, as it did with the north buffer, decline to waive and send the plan back to comply.
The mood lifted when the board turned to how the building will look. The existing “simulated mansard” — not a true roof, the engineer clarified, but an overhanging band of material — is failing on its own; one member joked the plan caught it “before it actually decided to demo itself.” In its place the applicant proposed a built-in-place stucco sign panel with score lines, a deliberate “homage” to the porcelain panels the building carried when it was built in the mid-1950s, back when the storefront was a garage with glass-filled bays.
The board's questions were about substance, not style. Members probed the material distinction between true stucco and EIFS/dryvet — a sprayed foam-backed lookalike that village code bars as a primary building material — and the engineer confirmed the proposal is cement stucco, troweled in place over a cement board substrate, which is not on the prohibited list. The board asked for physical texture and color samples and a nearby location to go see the finish before it signs off. One member liked the direction: “I like the homage to the original.”
The word “historic” drew a sharper line. When someone described the building's transparency change as preserving its “more historic character,” a colleague cut in: “Can we stop using historic with this building? It is not historic. … It's a block building.” Call it old, call it original — but this parcel carries no landmark designation, and the board wasn't going to let the adjective imply one.
The new stucco panel doubles as the place a future sign will live, and the board was careful with the vocabulary. Members declined to call it a “sign board” — which could imply approval for a sign spanning the whole facade — and settled on “sign band”: the zone where a sign may go, not a blanket allowance for its size. Signage is a separate approval and wasn't decided here.
The other open item is transparency. Main Street storefronts must show a minimum share of window glass; the applicant is at 28.4% today and proposes 31.72%, still short of the requirement — hence a waiver request — while the Mill Street facade stays at 8.82%. The board flagged the sign officer's thresholds for the record: signs under 16 square feet clear the sign officer alone, larger ones come to the Planning board, any illuminated sign comes to the board regardless of size, and total signage is capped at 50 square feet.
Main Street's design code sets a minimum transparency — the percentage of a ground-floor facade that must be clear glass — so the street stays walkable and alive rather than fronted by blank walls. A former garage with few openings starts well below the target, which is why 5630 Main is asking to be let off at 31.72% instead of meeting the full standard. The board can grant that latitude, but it noticed the gap and it isn't automatic.
The night's one approval went to a smaller job a few doors up the street. Joe Marinaccio and James Baglioli of Benderson Development brought back a revised architectural plan for tenant improvements at 5759 Main Street — and, notably, the revision dropped the facade changes an earlier submission had proposed, narrowing the request to new storefront glazing on the east and south elevations while keeping the building's existing colors and materials. Any future tenant signage, the board and applicant agreed, would come back as a separate application.
The board's questions ran to fit and finish: how the new windows would sit against neighboring storefronts, what the framing would be, whether lighting would change. It found the plan sound enough to approve, on member David Vitka's motion seconded by member Tom Petrocelli, 6-0 — but pinned down five conditions to keep the result consistent with the block. Signage is expressly excluded from the approval. A continuous building base must be carried beneath the new glazing on both elevations to match adjacent storefront conditions. The storefront framing is to be clear anodized aluminum. No changes are approved to the existing lighting plan. And the final plans submitted for stamped approval must bear original professional seals and signatures.
A conditional approval is still an approval — the applicant may proceed — but only if the listed conditions are met in the final, stamped drawings. Here the board signed off on the storefront-glazing concept while fixing the details that make a Main Street facade read as part of the streetscape: a continuous base beneath the windows, a specified framing finish, no unreviewed lighting or signage. The conditions travel with the approval; the building department checks them before permits issue.
All seven members answered the roll: Chair Catherine Waterman-Kulpa and members Colleen Leiker, Walter Pacer, Tom Petrocelli, Eugene Richards, Wes Stone, and David Vitka. Also at the table: Chip Grieco (Village Attorney, Bond, Schoeneck & King), Carol Boeck (Building & Zoning Clerk), Jeffrey Hahn (Trustee liaison), and Gary Palumbo (Town of Amherst planning). The board took five recorded actions on June 1 — the minutes approval, two motions tabling 5630 Main Street, the conditional approval of 5759 Main Street, and adjournment.
Motion to approve the minutes of the May 4, 2026 meeting; moved by member Colleen Leiker, seconded by member Wes Stone. Ayes 6, Noes 0, with member Tom Petrocelli abstaining.
Motion to table the architectural review of the 5630 Main Street restaurant redevelopment (engineer Jason Burford, Greenman-Pedersen Inc.) to give the applicant time to revise the plans and address the Board's comments — removal of the deteriorated simulated mansard roof, a new stucco sign band, and materials referencing the building's original porcelain-panel look, with material samples and additional detail to follow. Moved by Chair Waterman-Kulpa, seconded by member Walter Pacer. Ayes 7, Noes 0.
Motion to table the site plan modifications for 5630 Main Street to allow the applicant time to revise the plans as discussed and to pursue the required variances before the Zoning Board of Appeals. Direction included a landscaped buffer with curbing along the north property line (in place of the requested waiver and the “no-through-traffic” designation), additional Mill Street landscaping and stormwater infiltration, a refuse-enclosure detail protecting Ellicott Creek, creek-side and outdoor-storage screening, and rooftop mechanical screening. Moved by Chair Waterman-Kulpa, seconded by member Tom Petrocelli. Ayes 7, Noes 0.
Motion to approve the architectural review for tenant improvements at 5759 Main Street (Joe Marinaccio and James Baglioli of Benderson Development) as presented, subject to conditions: signage is excluded from this approval and requires separate application; a continuous building base must be carried beneath the new storefront glazing on the east and south elevations to match adjacent storefronts; storefront framing shall be clear anodized aluminum; no changes are approved to the existing lighting plan; and final stamped plans shall bear original professional seals and signatures. Moved by member David Vitka, seconded by member Tom Petrocelli. Ayes 6, Noes 0.
Motion to adjourn; moved by member David Vitka, seconded by member Colleen Leiker; carried. Ayes 6, Noes 0. The meeting adjourned at about 8:30 p.m. The next Planning Board meeting is scheduled for July 20, 2026, replacing the regularly scheduled August meeting.
This brief has been reconciled against the Board's official June 1, 2026 minutes, which are the source for the roster, the docket, and every vote reported here. Two honest caveats remain: those minutes are still in draft/unapproved form until the Board formally adopts them, and the Village published no June 1 agenda PDF — the docket used here is taken from the minutes themselves. Quotations are drawn from the meeting audio and lightly cleaned for readability; where the audio was garbled or uncertain, the substance has been paraphrased conservatively or omitted rather than guessed.