Most of the room raised their hands when Supervisor Damian Ulatowski asked who had come for the McDonald's hearing, so he moved it to the front of the July 21 agenda. Ninety minutes later, the Town of Clay Town Board adjourned it again — the fourth straight month the application has gone before the board without a vote — and pushed a decision to August 18. The delay came despite, or because of, a traffic study the town commissioned itself. Kelsey Wassel, an engineer with C&S, told the board her firm studied Taft Road from Bear Road to Janus Park Drive, weighing not just the proposed McDonald's at 4979 W. Taft Road but a planned credit union at Cedar Post Road and a senior living project near Bear Road. Using a standard A-to-F grading scale, where A through C are good, D is acceptable and E-F are unacceptable, Wassel said the Bear Road/Taft Road and Janus Park/Taft Road intersections both already rate E-F depending on time of day, with peak congestion from noon to 1 p.m. and again from 4 to 5 p.m. Town Engineer Ron DeTota added that most of the corridor's accidents already cluster at Taft and Bear and at Taft and Cedar Post. Board members did not hide their own doubts. Councilor David Capria called the traffic plan "a terrible idea," objecting that it would funnel cars left toward Wegmans through an area thick with shopping carts, children and pedestrians; Councilor Joseph Bick agreed and said it would cut into his own frequent Wegmans trips. Councilor Deborah Magaro-Dolan mentioned she had recently been hit by another car in that same parking lot, struck by a vehicle entering from Cedar Post Road. Councilor Ryan Pleskach noted the town had paid for an independent traffic study but said he had not yet had a chance to review it — moments before Wassel's presentation began. Residents lined up with more: worries that the study didn't account for snow piles and parked equipment eating into the lot; delivery trucks routed past pedestrians in front of the stores; no marked crosswalks outside the Wegmans entrance; and references to "street racers" already drawing complaints at the Route 11 McDonald's. One resident asked why the town needed a third McDonald's location nearby at all. Another asked what would happen to the town's rodent population. A Wintersweet neighborhood resident, citing worries about home values, asked Ulatowski how many more times residents would have to turn out before the board simply said no. Ulatowski responded that the board had already required the applicant to reapply once because the process had dragged on so long, and that adjourning again would let the applicant review the C&S study before at least one more session with residents. The applicant's team, led by attorney Joe Frateschi of Harris Beach and site planner Steve Wilson, said landscaping and a single approved entrance from Cedar Post Road were designed to improve traffic flow, not worsen it. They said the project would require 677 parking spaces under current code, down from 816 spaces on the site today, leaving 702 spaces once construction is complete. Councilor Eugene Young asked that Code Enforcement weigh in on the parking count before the next hearing. Roughly two hours later, with a smaller crowd remaining, the board took up a different gas station. It voted 5-2 to approve Sonbyrne Sales/Clay-Dolshire Byrne Dairy's special permit for a gas station and convenience store at 7190 Buckley Road. Young again raised a traffic warning, saying the project "will create a dangerous impact on traffic." Pleskach countered that Onondaga County has multiple road improvements planned for the area; Magaro-Dolan said she would base her vote on those planned improvements, and Capria agreed. The board also closed, without voting, a long-running hearing on a 1,000-gallon fuel tank at a Goguen Drive contractors' yard — a case adjourned repeatedly since January 2024 — after a resident pressed the board on when it would say no to that kind of request. McDonald's Cases #1224 and #1231 are now set to resume August 18, the same night the board will open hearings on a Verizon franchise renewal, a two-family-dwelling permit on Orangeport Road, and new stop signs for four intersections in the Northfield-Tallmadge neighborhood.