Clarence, one of Erie County’s most desired suburbs, went more than six years without construction of a major new home subdivision.

In most places, the reason these days would be the recession.

But that is not entirely the case in Clarence, according to two developers who spent the entire period — or 2,234 days — trying to navigate a relatively modest project through a maze of rules, regulations and complicated policies and calculations that, even today, leave brothers John and Joe Rubino shaking their heads.

“It’s the longest time by far it’s ever taken us to get a project through,” said Joe Rubino.

Doing business anywhere else — take Amherst, for instance — is a breeze by comparison, they said.

It’s not hard to understand their frustration. There was no venting by the locals against the project, and the Rubinos didn’t need to rezone the property. Both are usually major stumbling blocks.

But it still took two lawsuits, a multitude of varying designs and a long tug of war over sewer capacity to win approval of what ended up being 44 mostly ranch-style patio homes built on 28 acres.

Preliminary site work at the subdivision, at Clarence Center and Shimerville roads, is nearly done, and home construction is set to start late next month.

Half of the property will be reserved for existing woods and meadowland, as required by the master plan. The homes in Amber Meadows will sell for $319,900 each.

“We are very proud of this development,” John Rubino said, “and we hope the town will be too.”

About five new building projects are in the pipeline in Clarence, said James B. Callahan, the town’s director of community development, and some already existing subdivisions are adding on.

But the Rubino project ends a dry spell of new subdivisions for Clarence — one of the few growth spots in Erie County and so popular that earlier in the decade it was seeing 200 homes built each year.

Town officials are now “reviewing that [entire planning] process,” Town Supervisor Scott Bylewski said, although he does not credit the dispute with the Rubinos for it. He said it is part of the town’s Six Sigma efficiency program.

He also said town officials did not treat the Rubinos unfairly.

“There were a number of issues that had to be resolved,” Bylewski said. “We did what we had to do to protect our citizens. We have to give every development a hard look.”

Part of the issue is the town’s attitude toward new home building these days.

After a big growth spurt in the 1990s, a backlash by the locals ushered in a new slow-growth majority on the Town Board around 2003. About then, the Rubinos submitted concept plans for a bigger, traditional home subdivision. But before the proposal could go far, the Town Board imposed an 18-month moratorium on new homes.

It emerged with a controlled- growth master plan with a preference for “open space” designs in which the homes are built in clusters surrounded by green space that can total 50 percent of the acreage involved.

Calculations about how many homes could be built, and how much green space should be included, yielded a variety of scenarios. There were concerns about the environmental impact. But the bigger problem was sewer capacity.

The Rubino project is in Clarence Sewer District No. 6, serviced under contract by Erie County Sewer District No. 5, which flows into the Amherst treatment plant.

Clarence requested a letter in 2003 from Amherst guaranteeing that No. 5 had enough capacity for the Rubino project. The Rubinos said they provided it, along with other documents indicating capacity was not a problem.

Still, District No. 5 had problems with leakage, which caused overflows in Amherst during wet weather. Rather than wait for Amherst to fix the problem so they could count on No. 5 to take care of No. 6, Rubino said he and his brother paid $55,700 in 2005 for an upgrade in Amherst to fix the problem.

“End of problem,” he said.

Not exactly. Amherst, he said, sent letters to Clarence, County Sewer District No. 5 and county health officials notifying them that the upgrade freed up capacity for development.

But the matter was not settled. Town officials were still worried about the Rubinos’ claim that the fix solved any potential problems, particularly because Clarence had trouble in the past with developers trying to expand sewer capacity without working with the town.

“We felt like they were doing an end run around us,” said Councilman Joseph Weiss. “It got our backs up.”

The Rubinos filed suit against Clarence in 2006.

“They were looking for problems,” John said, “where there weren’t any.”

The Rubinos won their lawsuit in 2007, only to end up filing another one in 2008 regarding, again, the sewer issue and environmental impacts from their project. The judge ruled in their favor.

At one point, the brothers said, they threatened to go back to court and seek monetary damages. But in the end, that wasn’t needed; the project won Town Board approval last year — six years, three months and 35 meetings with various town officials later, the Rubinos said.

“Long story short, [the Rubinos] thought we took too long. and we thought it should comply with the master plan and with our zoning,” Bylewski said. “In the end, they did comply.”

But it was frustrating, Joe Rubino said, and expensive.

“When this started, our kids were in grade school, and we had brown hair,” he said. “Now they’re in high school, and we have gray hairs.”