Town Board Denies Wegmans Plaza McDonald's After 14 Months of Redesigns — for the Reason Everyone Kept Naming

Key Actions & Decisions

• ◆ January 22, 2025 Town Board: the original McDonald's application for 4979 W. Taft Road (Case #1210, on file since 2024) was declared abandoned and denied after no one appeared for the applicant; it had already been adjourned four times since August 2024
• ◆ March 17, 2025 Town Board, 7-0: called a new public hearing on a re-filed application (Case #1224) for a 1.33-acre drive-thru restaurant on the same parcel, two months after the original application (Case #1210) had been declared abandoned
• ◆ April 9, 2025 Planning Board: Chairman Mitchell withheld a referral pending a full site drawing of internal traffic circulation; resident Sandy Laurenti told the board 300 petitions had been submitted to the Town Board two days earlier; resident Erika Gallucci told the board McDonald's had been rejected for a one-lane drive-thru at this site in 2016
• ◆ Town Board adjourned the Case #1224 public hearing four consecutive months — April 7, May 5, June 2 and July 21, 2025 — before closing it on August 18, 2025
• ◆ May 28 and July 9, 2025 Planning Board sessions: the applicant's engineers shifted the building east, cut proposed parking from 64 to 43 spaces and reworked drive-thru islands to route exiting traffic toward the signal at Taft Road, while board members Graves, McMahon and Henty repeatedly said drivers would still cut through to Cedar Post Road
• ◆ August 18, 2025 Town Board: the applicant's traffic consultant (GTS) and the town's own consultant (C&S) presented conflicting studies over where exiting traffic would go; the applicant said it would withdraw from the site rather than force the issue if the town and residents did not want it there
• ◆ September 3, 2025 Town Board, 6-0: adopted findings citing the town's C&S study — 10 crashes at West Taft Road and Cedar Post Road in three years, eight of them right-angle collisions, and a drop in level of service from "E" to "F" at that intersection and at Bear Road under the McDonald's build scenario — and denied both the special permit and the related zone change
• ◆ Councilor Pleskach submitted written comments opposing both applications in advance; the roll-call votes recorded that night list six of the seven board members, without Pleskach among them