Features & Investigations
The stories that don't fit in one meeting: money traced across budgets, laws rewritten in
real time, and an $89 billion project meeting a town built for strip malls. Everything
here is drawn from the public record — and linked back to it.
📰 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.
📰 Editorials
Two companies, three battery-storage applications, and a fire-safety fight that led Clay to pause everything and write the rules first.
🏭 Micron Development
A 1,377-acre site. Four semiconductor fabs. $100 billion. And a small-town planning board navigating the biggest development project in New York history.
📰 Editorials
A sound reading 50 decibels over the daytime code limit, concerts run without a permit “for years,” and a zone-change case adjourned twice: the paper trail of a noise dispute the town has yet to resolve.
📰 Editorials
The town named a Micron committee and bought growth software, but the banks and subdivisions moving through its boards never mention the company. What the minutes connect to Micron — and what they don't.