Amherst, NY (WBEN) - The successor to Brian Kulpa as Amherst Supervisor will be decided Tuesday on Election Day. Dan Gagliardo and Shawn Lavin will go head-to-head to occupy the top office at Amherst Town Hall.
Lavin says the town needs to get smarter and quicker. "On our technology front, I want to merge the services we currently offer to our residents with the technology we have in front of us. I feel like we're behind. And I think if we could kind of intertwine, for instance, the way our snow plows plow our streets and the highway department is incredible. But I want to make sure people can look at a website and say, hey, look, my street got plowed an hour ago, right? So I'm good to go to work, because we have the technology. We just have to put those together so the residents see what their services are providing," says Lavin.
He admits there's room for improvement when it comes to transparency. "We can always do better, and there's always room for improvement. The reality, though, is, here we are in 2025, you can watch our meetings on YouTube, and you can get your information about programs and projects through online PDF files by the hundreds of pages. What we need to be better at is telling people where to find it, right, being very transparent about saying, hey, look, here's where all of our data is. We encourage you to go look at it. We encourage dialog. And I think if you're going to do that, people will kind of come around to saying, well, the town of Amherst, it was there. We just didn't know it. And I think that's where we need to be better," .
The Westwood County Club sale has also been a pressing issue. He says most of the matter predates his time as deputy supervisor. "We're going back to 2010. I didn't take office until January 1 of 2018. That purchase of that property was back in 2010 by an independent company hoping to redevelop that property into residential or commercial properties. The town, listening to the residents surrounding that park, said, 'Hey, look, the residents do not want that development.' The town of Amherst invested that money, bought the parcel, and said, good, when you want to get to a destination, you sit in the driver's seat, and that's what we did," explains Lavin. "Now Mr. Gagliardo has an article 78 against us, as well as an ethics complaint. I think both of those are meritless. On the ethics side, anybody who worked for Erie County recused themselves on the vote. So I don't think that really pertains, because I wasn't even part of the vote of. The town followed all the rules and codes properly. So I'm excited for the future of this park. I'm excited for the residents to finally use it after 12 years of being fed stuff that's 12 years too long."
Dan Gagliardo says when he moved to Amherst 15 years ago, the town was a shining spot. Now things have differed with transparency and financial accountability. "We need to get information out to as many people as we possibly can. Right now, we don't do that. We need to be upfront with the residents, get them involved with anything that we're doing," says Gagliardo. He adds the town needs to do some financial work. "We need to have accountability. We need to go through our budgets, go through our line by line, and look and see where the money is going to. We have to curb them. We have to curb our spending because it makes a difference. It's not right that we had a 40% increase in taxes over the last eight years. So it's my goal to have a plan in place which is a ten, five, zero plan. We're going to cut 10% of expenses, bring down taxes by 5% and 0% unnecessary bonding. So I'm very focused on our financial picture, getting respect to the residents, bringing up our services and making sure we have enough police helping our fire departments as much as we can."
Regarding Westwood, Gagliardo says when Mensch owned it, there was a golf course, and they couldn't do anything over there because of the sewer system. "So the town went in and bought it based on Amherst Central Park, and it was part of this whole group. But what happened was Musicalfare did not occur. But we spent $27 million with the purchase of Westwood. My problem is this, in April, when they came out with a press release about doing a golf course and a passive park, they never went out and found out whether anybody was willing to come in and take this over as a taxable entity. There is no formal RFP that was done. And unfortunately, if they'd listened to the residents from day one, this is exactly what they were saying from the beginning," notes Gagliardo. "My problem is that they waited until August to let the people say what they needed to, and they were remiss in their duties in doing that. That's why I started the article 78. That's why me and my candidates did that was because we spent $7.8 million and they're making their way for $1. They didn't give us enough time to do a permissive referendum. We asked for this in April, but they didn't listen to us. The transparency is just inconceivable how they didn't talk to anybody before they were doing what they did."
Gagliardo believes the election will be a referendum on Westwood. "They're just upset that we would sell this for $1. We've never looked anywhere else to see whether anybody's willing to come in and do this as a golf course, and if nobody is interested, I think that we should be considering to make it our town golf course, run it and operate like we would do with Audubon. We don't have the costs, but we make $400,000 on Audubon. So the most important thing is that we could do the exact same thing and sell Audubon, which is a much more conducive place to do development. So there are things that they were remiss in doing it they should have," says Gagliardo.
Brian Kulpa cannot run for a third term under the town's term limits.