Five months after Mirabito Energy Projects first asked the Clay Town Board to approve a drive-thru Dunkin' Donuts and a drive-thru NBT Bank on the same 9.57-acre parcel at Route 31 and Lawton Road, the board closed the public hearing on both applications March 3 without taking a vote on the merits. It was the fifth hearing session on the project since October, and it ended with the applicant's own consultant acknowledging that the Planning Board considers two drive-thrus on one site too much for the parcel. Matt Napierala of Napierala Consulting, appearing with engineer Gordon Stansbury and Mirabito representatives Jim Ballantyne and Joe Miller, walked the board through a reworked traffic plan meant to answer concerns raised at earlier sessions. Access from Route 31 would now be right-in, right-out only, with full turning access moved to Lawton Road, realigned to meet Crabtree per the recommendation of NYS DOT. Napierala described, turn by turn, how cars would loop behind the building to reach the Dunkin' Donuts order and pickup windows, and separately to reach the NBT Bank teller window, before exiting back onto Route 31 or Lawton Road. Stansbury put numbers to the plan: seven cars of stacking before the order board, five more to the pickup window, and five car-lengths of stacking at the bank window, with 30-inch lanes he said leave room to bail out. He estimated 100 to 150 cars an hour for the gas pumps, convenience store and attached Subway; 40 to 50 an hour for the Dunkin' Donuts; and 10 to 15 an hour for the bank, based on a traffic study conducted during both the morning and afternoon school-session rush. Councilors pressed on what the plan didn't settle. Young asked about pedestrians crossing between the fuel pumps and the store. Wisnowski raised the mix of traffic and school buses at peak hours. Pleskach asked whether the road would be reinforced for the 18-wheelers and other large vehicles the site would draw, and warned that a future tenant on the parcel's undeveloped east side — a McDonald's, for instance — could upend the traffic study entirely; Napierala said any road reinforcement would be worked out with the Planning Board at site plan review. Representatives of the MCFD asked about right-in, right-out access for fire apparatus, the location of the nearest hydrant and where large trucks would park; Napierala said the site's fueling area is not built for tractor-trailers and has no dedicated truck spaces, but that Mirabito would meet with the fire chief directly. Magaro-Dolan returned to renderings she had requested earlier and asked, pointedly, whether Mirabito would still build if the board denied one of the two applications. Napierala said the company's decades-long partnership with Dunkin' Donuts meant it would proceed with that use alone if the bank were rejected — and it was in that exchange that he told the board the Planning Board felt two drive-thru services were too much for the parcel. He also promised a side-by-side comparison to the Byrne Dairy at Buckley Road and Henry Clay Boulevard that Young had asked about; it was filed with the Clerk's office four days after the meeting. The same night, the board approved zone changes clearing the way for a Seneca Savings financial facility on Route 31 and a residential subdivision on Marc Lebiedzinski's Morgan Road land, and scheduled a March 17 hearing on yet another gas station and convenience store, this one proposed by Sonbyrne Sales for the Byrne Dairy chain on Buckley Road — a reminder that the Mirabito debate over how much drive-thru and fueling traffic one parcel can absorb is playing out against a wider run of commercial applications along the town's corridors. A separate senior-housing proposal, the Laurel Springs project on West Taft Road, came back smaller than the version the board rejected in August 2024 — 60 units instead of 71, all in one building under three stories, with no direct-entry garages proposed. But councilors could not get a clear answer on whether the development's 55-and-over age restriction would bar a resident's younger spouse or child from living there, and adjourned the hearing to April 7 while the Town looks into it. The board also closed out a slate of routine business: reauthorizing the Town's public-health-emergency plan, awarding two contracts to C&S Engineers for landfill monitoring and groundwater sampling, and signing on to a regional stormwater compliance program. All passed 6-0. The Mirabito special permits, the Laurel Springs hearing and the Goguen Drive Realty hearing are all due back before the board April 7; the Byrne Dairy hearing is set for March 17.