For fourteen months, engineers redrew the same corner of the Wegmans Plaza parking lot — shifting a building eight feet east, cutting parking from 64 spaces to 43, adding turn islands, marking off employee-only spaces — trying to keep McDonald's customers from exiting onto Cedar Post Road. On September 3, 2025, the Town of Clay denied the application anyway, citing a town-commissioned traffic study that concluded what board members, residents and even the applicant's own engineer had already acknowledged, meeting after meeting: however the lot got redesigned, drivers were going to find Cedar Post Road. The fight over a McDonald's drive-thru at 4979 West Taft Road, inside the Wegmans Plaza, goes back further than the case that just ended. Planning Board Chairman Russ Mitchell said in July that he'd been "back and forth on this project since 2016," and resident Erika Gallucci told the board that spring that McDonald's had come before them nine years earlier proposing a single-lane drive-thru and been rejected. The application that occupied the record from 2024 into 2025, Town Board Case #1210, was adjourned four times between August and November 2024, and on January 22, 2025, with no one present to speak for the applicant, the Town Board declared it abandoned and denied. That didn't end it. Within two months, the Town Board called a new hearing on a refiled version, Case #1224, along with a companion zone change, Case #1231, to make the parcel's split zoning consistent. This time the design was bigger: a side-by-side, two-lane drive-thru — two lanes entering, two lanes ordering, merging to one lane to leave — as the applicant's engineer described it to the Planning Board in April. Attorney Joe Frateschi of Harris Beach told the board the new plans incorporated a year of comments from the town and public. Chairman Mitchell wasn't satisfied — he withheld a referral that night, asking for a full drawing of the plaza's internal traffic pattern; board member Mr. Graves said the plaza was already hard to navigate before McDonald's added more cars. Two days earlier, resident Sandy Laurenti told the Town Board that 300 petitions opposing the project had been submitted. Over the following months the applicant kept revising. By late May, the building had moved east and the acreage had shrunk from 1.2 to 0.88; by July, it had shifted another eight feet, with eleven parking spaces marked for employees only and green space added at the northwest corner. Each time, Planning Board members raised the same concern. In July, residents Debbie Errante and Erika Gallucci told the board that drivers leaving McDonald's and finding the lot backed up would simply turn around and cut through to Cedar Post Road rather than wait for the signal. Board member Mr. McMahon said he agreed with them: "It is obvious vehicles will channel to Cedarpost," he said. Mitchell, summing up the site's basic problem, said fitting McDonald's into the plaza was "like putting 10 lbs. in a 5 lb. bag." The Town Board's own numbers hardened that concern into something harder to wave off. At the July 21 hearing, the applicant's team first told the board there had been four accidents at the Taft Road signal over three years, then revised that account to 25 total accidents on the stretch of Taft Road over the same period. Fire Chief Mike Brown said his department responded to accident calls in the area frequently. By the time the Town Board adopted its findings on September 3, the town's own consultant, C&S Engineering, had produced a narrower and more specific number: 10 crashes at the West Taft Road/Cedar Post Road intersection alone in three years, eight of them right-angle collisions — a crash type more likely to cause injury. The same study found that adding McDonald's would push both that intersection and West Taft Road at Bear Road from a Level of Service of "E" to "F," the lowest rating on the scale, and generate an estimated 128 new vehicle trips at midday and 94 in the evening peak. The applicant and the town never agreed on whose numbers to trust. At the August 18 hearing, traffic consultant Gordon Stansbury walked the board through the difference between the applicant's study, prepared by GTS, and the town's, prepared by C&S: GTS assumed most drivers would use the signal to exit, while C&S assumed most would use Cedar Post Road instead. Frateschi told the board that McDonald's wanted to be "a good neighbor" and would drop the site rather than force it through over the town's and residents' objections. The hearing closed that night without a vote. The vote came two weeks later. On September 3, the Town Board adopted findings of "definable potential specific harm" from the C&S data and denied both the special permit and the zone change, 6-0 on each. Councilor Ryan Pleskach had submitted written comments beforehand saying he intended to vote no on both applications; he does not appear in either roll call, and the minutes do not otherwise explain his absence. Supervisor Damian Ulatowski and Councilors Wisnowski, Young, Bick, Magaro-Dolan and Capria are recorded as voting to deny. With McDonald's gone, the corner it fought over is not done generating hearings. A special permit for a Northern Credit Union building on the same stretch of West Taft Road came before the Town Board that same September 3 meeting, minutes after the McDonald's denial, and was adjourned again, to September 15. Onondaga County's planning department, reviewing the McDonald's case earlier in the year, had asked for a traffic study covering the whole corridor — the senior housing project and both credit unions along with McDonald's — before any further access changes to West Taft Road; Chairman Mitchell told the Planning Board in April that the county was not approving new ingress or egress on that road at all for the time being. The intersection the town's own study rated failing didn't get any less busy the day McDonald's left the file.