📰 Editorials
On a single night in May 2025, the Clay Town Board approved three separate bank and credit-union drive-thru applications along the Route 31 and West Taft Road corridor, days after a councilor predicted the O-2 zoning behind one of them would set a pattern for the corridor. Eighteen months later, a Summit Federal Credit Union application the board had denied outright has been approved at a new address nearby, a fourth institution (Community Bank) has won its own permit, and several of the projects' site plans are still working through repeated Planning Board adjournments.
Editorials
After a McDonald's drive-thru proposal for the Wegmans Plaza corner died once by default in January 2025 and was refiled, adjourned four straight months, and redesigned repeatedly through the summer, the Town Board denied both the special permit and the zone change on September 3, 2025, citing a town-commissioned traffic study that found failing intersections and crash data at the exact corner — Cedar Post Road — that planning board members, residents and even the applicant's own engineer had been naming as the likely trouble spot all along.
Editorials
For fourteen straight routine items at its June 8, 2026 meeting, the Liverpool Board of Education split 5-4 on an identical line every time — but a tax-settlement tie, a failed motion to go into closed session, a job-cutting vote and two contested appointments over the following weeks show no coalition held twice.
Editorials
The Reserve at Clay, a proposed Cornerstone Homes CNY LLC subdivision on Lawton Road, needs a zone change from RA-100 to R-7.5 to build 61 single-family lots on 20.18 acres -- land that officials say could otherwise hold only 8 to 10 houses. The Planning Board recommended the change 5-1 on June 10, 2026, even though the Town of Cicero, which shares jurisdiction over Lawton Road, still had not responded to the town's outreach; the Town Board's public hearing remained open as of its last recorded session.
Editorials
Facing a permit-fee formula built for ordinary construction and a legal risk that a lawsuit could leave it with far less than that formula implies, the Town of Clay negotiated a $30 million Community Host Agreement with Micron for Fab 1 in July 2026 — but the same night's record gives two different Fab 1 price tags ($89 billion and $8.9 billion), a resident's tally of the deal that doesn't match officials' figures, and a Host Agreement vote that the released minutes never record.
Editorials
Clay's building-permit fee formula - $100 for a project's first $1,000 of value, $7 per thousand after - was built for houses and strip malls; on July 7, 2026, town officials priced Micron's Fab 1 alone at $89 billion and calculated what that old formula would produce: $69 million in fees the state only lets the town spend on inspections. The same collision, of ordinary-scale rules meeting extraordinary-scale machines, runs through the town's whole 2026 record: a battery-storage law repeatedly loosening its own safety numbers while three permit applications wait, a zoning code with no category at all for data centers, and a $30 million Community Host Agreement with Micron that was moved and seconded on July 7 - with no vote recorded before the meeting adjourned.
Planning Board
The Clay Planning Board opened public hearings on a proposed Amazon warehouse, listed in the minutes at 234,300 (the record omits the unit), on Morgan Road and a National Grid gas line expansion serving Micron's Caughdenoy Road campus at its July 22, 2026 meeting. Chairwoman Michelle Borton disputed the warehouse applicant's traffic-impact conclusions on the record and disclosed that the board's own attorney also represents the gas line applicant; both cases, and every other case on the agenda, were adjourned to August 12 without a vote.