Inside a cozy living room on Eagle Street in Williamsville, Kevin Gaughan held court for two hours one recent evening, his rhetoric burning longer than the logs in the fireplace.

Frequent references to the founding fathers sought to equate the village dissolution movement he started in Erie County with the very notion of patriotism itself.

“We’re going to have what [John] Adams and [Thomas] Jefferson and [Alexander] Hamilton would want us to have, and that is a community conversation in the American tradition of trying to figure out how best to govern ourselves,” he beamed. “We’re going to let the voters of Williamsville decide.”

Williamsville, along with Lancaster and Sloan, will be in the first wave of village dissolution votes. Volunteers will begin circulating petitions in those places early next month, with the goal of putting the measure on the ballot in each place sometime in September.

Last week, Gaughan held an inaugural meeting for volunteers in each village. The plan: Gather the faithful, infuse them with energy and offer a quick primer on how to gather the signatures needed to put the measure on the ballot.

It would be an understatement to say results were mixed.

The moment Gaughan stepped into Eddie Ryan’s, the Central Avenue restaurant where he decided to have his Lancaster meeting, things went off script.

Soon after he arrived, Ed Church, the owner of the restaurant, pulled him aside to let him know he did not appreciate being blindsided. Gaughan never called to ask if he could hold the meeting there—he just sent out a mass e-mail announcing that’s where it would be.

In the days before, as word spread that the meeting would be at Eddie Ryan’s, some residents threatened to boycott the restaurant. Church fumed at Gaughan. As a business owner, he does not take public positions on controversial issues like this one, he said.

“This meeting should not have been held here,” he said later.

“There’s no one here that would’ve given him permission.”

But being called out for his lack of planning was just the beginning of an unnerving night for Gaughan in Lancaster.

He was expecting four or five prospective volunteers, he said. What he got was a small crowd of more than 20, the vast majority of them confirmed skeptics. They came not to join Gaughan’s movement, but to get some information.

They came with plenty of questions.

What will happen to the village’s fire department? Will village employees lose their jobs? Will taxes go up for people living in the town? What will happen to the sales tax revenue that now goes to the village?

Gaughan sidestepped specific answers for the most part, but tried to offer assurances that he wasn’t trying to eliminate jobs — other than politicians’ jobs, anyway. All the answers people were looking for would be revealed in the coming months, he said.

“I’ve done considerable research, and I have a plan,” he said.

That wasn’t the answer most people wanted to hear. They had come expecting to see the plan, to hear those answers that night.

Joseph Maciejewski, the director of real property tax services in Erie County and a Lancaster School Board member, said he attended the meeting in neither of his official capacities.

Like many, he said he is withholding judgment until he sees some numbers — but he seemed less hostile to dissolving the village than many others who were there.

“I am a numbers person. I do want to see a cost-benefit analysis,” said Maciejewski, a lifelong resident of the Village of Lancaster. “Deep down, do I feel that if there is a dissolution of the village, there will be a tax savings? Yes, I do.”

John Bruso, an operations supervisor at UPS who lives in the Town of Lancaster, said he has yet to make up his mind.

“I didn’t see any numbers,” he said. “It’s a popular idea. Is it a good idea? I don’t know.”

The villages of Sloan and Williamsville tell two different stories: one, a blue-collar community struggling to get by; the other, a white-collar enclave that carries a certain cachet.

But Gaughan’s living-room meetings in the two places were as similar as the villages themselves are different.

About 20 people showed up at each, a mix of village residents and others, with retirees well represented. Loyalty to Gaughan ran deep.

In Sloan, more than a dozen village residents showed up, along with a few people from Cheektowaga and Orchard Park.

In Williamsville, 18 people gathered, about half of them from the village. One woman, a stay-at-home mom married to an engineer, said she was reserving judgment until she got more information. But she seemed to be the sole skeptic in a sea of believers.

“I think the cost of living in the village is too high, and I think the town should dissolve it,” said Bob Wnek, who lives in Williamsville.

Jane Woodward, the former Amherst council member, was joined at the meeting by four of her Williamsville neighbors, who agree that it’s time for the village government to be dissolved.

“I know we can do this in Williamsville,” she said, drawing hearty applause from around the room.

The village residents were joined by eight others — from Depew, Orchard Park, Hamburg, Kenmore and Alden — all of them die-hard Gaughan followers, most of whom had worked on the successful efforts last year to downsize five town boards.

Gaughan, a Buffalo attorney, spent nearly two hours recapping the merits of village dissolution, laying out a timeline for the process, providing simple rules to follow for those going door-to-door to gather signatures to put the vote on the ballot, and answering questions.

Chief among the volunteers’ concerns was how to deal with those who don’t agree.

“Are we going to be given a list of names of people who work for the village?” one man wondered. (The answer: No.)

“Have you thought about this in terms of the resistance you’ll have going to the homes where people are working for the village?” a man from Depew asked.

Gaughan downplayed the level of opposition — too much, some volunteers said.

He estimated at least 96 percent of residents in any given town were agreeable to signing a downsizing petition; privately, some volunteers later suggested it was more like 60 percent to 70 percent.

And most seemed to agree that the opposition would likely be greater when it comes to dissolving a village government.

“There will be times when you approach a home, and someone says, ‘That Kevin Gaughan is a son of a b---h,’” Gaughan acknowledged. “You just smile and say, ‘You’re right. He is.’ We don’t engage in any arguments. When you encounter someone with a differing view, respect it and move on.”

Some of those differing views started to present themselves in a very tangible way last week. Just a few days before volunteers converged for their meeting in a house on Crocker Street in Sloan, a large sign went up in front of a house across the street.

“Will Dissolving Our Village Reduce Your Taxes?” it says, red letters on a white background. “Ask Questions. Be Educated. Be Informed.”