On the night of May 19, 2025, the Clay Town Board approved three separate bank and credit-union drive-thru applications before adjourning: a special permit for Canandaigua National Bank's branch in the Wegmans Plaza on Oswego Road, passed 4-2 with Councilors Magaro-Dolan and Capria voting no; a special permit for Seneca Savings' drive-thru bank on State Route 31, approved 6-0; and a zone change clearing Northern Credit Union's branch at the corner of West Taft Road and Wintersweet Drive, also approved 6-0. Two weeks earlier, at a hearing on the Seneca Savings application, Councilor Pleskach told the board he was happy with the O-2 zoning for that site and said, according to the minutes, that it may set a precedence for future development along the Route 31 corridor. The record since then shows the corridor kept building past that one night. Over the following fourteen months, Route 31 and West Taft Road absorbed a fourth financial institution — and, in a striking reversal, an application the town had denied outright came back and won. That reversal belongs to Summit Federal Credit Union. On Feb. 3, 2025, the Town Board voted 6-0, with one councilor abstaining, to deny Summit's zone change for a branch at 5047 West Taft Road, citing the parcel's proximity to residential homes, a close and unsignalized intersection, lack of buffer, and what councilors described as hazardous traffic conditions in the Wegmans parking lot. A year later, facing the expiration of its lease at 5201 West Taft Road in June 2027, with the property owner unwilling to extend, Summit returned with a new application on a different parcel down the same road, at 4955 West Taft Road. The Planning Board recommended it 7-0 in February 2026 — Chairman Mitchell called it a "good fit for the neighborhood" — and the Town Board approved the zone change and both required special permits unanimously on March 16, 2026. Northern Credit Union's own path shows how contested and slow the corridor became. Its first zone-change request for the West Taft Road site sought commercial zoning broad enough to draw objections from Inverness Gardens residents worried about traffic, privacy and property values. The applicant withdrew that request on May 5, 2025 and the same night sought a new hearing for narrower O-2 office zoning instead, which the board approved 6-0 on May 19. The credit union's special permit for the same site wasn't approved until Dec. 15, 2025, seven months later, and its site plan is still not final: as of the Planning Board's July 8, 2026 meeting, it had been adjourned ten times, most recently to Aug. 12, 2026. A second Northern Credit Union branch, at 3584 State Route 31, needed its own area variance — a reduction in the required setback from Route 31 to 129 feet — before the Town Board approved its special permit 4-0 on Nov. 17, 2025. Seneca Savings and Canandaigua National Bank went through their own marathons even after their special permits were in hand. Seneca Savings' site plan was adjourned eight times between May and November 2025 before the Planning Board approved it 6-0. Canandaigua National Bank's site plan needed five adjournments before its Oct. 8, 2025 approval. Residents tracking the corridor added up the totals themselves. At a May 28, 2025 Planning Board hearing on a nearby McDonald's drive-thru, resident Erika Gallucci cited an estimated 1,000 vehicles a day added by Summit Credit Union, Northern Credit Union and McDonald's combined, saying it is already "a nightmare now" getting out of the Wegmans parking lot. The Onondaga County Planning Department made a similar point in official form: a March 2025 referral on the McDonald's application required a traffic study covering "traffic generation data from concurrently proposed projects along West Taft Road (Inverness Gardens Senior Housing, Northern Credit Union, Summit Credit Union, and McDonalds)," rather than evaluating any one project alone. That McDonald's application did not survive the scrutiny that the bank projects passed. On Sept. 3, 2025, the Town Board voted 6-0 to deny both its zone change and its special permit, adopting written findings of "definable specific harm" — evidence that the corridor's run of bank approvals was not automatic for every drive-thru that applied. The newest entrant is Community Bank, which filed in early 2026 to build a branch on a pad in the Raymour and Flanigan plaza at 4000 State Route 31. It needed area variances to reduce a side-yard setback from 75 feet to 44 feet and a landscape strip from 30 feet to 25 feet, both granted unanimously by the Zoning Board of Appeals. Its special permit passed the Town Board by a closer 5-1 vote on May 18, 2026, with Councilor Gauthier opposed; its site plan was still before the Planning Board as of early July 2026, adjourned to July 22. What remains open: Northern Credit Union's West Taft Road site plan, adjourned to Aug. 12, 2026; Community Bank's site plan, adjourned to July 22, 2026; and Summit Federal Credit Union's site plan for its new Carriage Parkway-area branch, still being revised at the Planning Board's July 8, 2026 meeting. None of the four newest financial institutions along the corridor has opened for business yet.