GUILDERLAND — Gregory Wolanin told the zoning board he is saving history by storing World War II vehicles, but the board denied his variance request since it doesn’t fit zoning for his residential property.

Wolanin appeared on Oct. 5 to request a variance that would allow him to place four large storage containers on property he owns, behind an office building at 12 McKown Rd. The property, which is vacant and sits behind the office building owned by Wolanin known as One Pinnacle Place, is zoned RO-30, or single-family residential.

Chairman Thomas Remmert said that storage units known as “pods” have become more commonplace in driveways or on lawns in recent years, and so a provision about them was added to the town’s recently revised zoning and land-use code.

According to the new code, a residential property can house one storage unit no larger than 20 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 10 feet tall (a non-residential lot can house as many as three). Wolanin wanted to put in four containers, each 40 feet long, on his residential property.

The containers were recently moved from the other Guilderland property that Wolanin, a developer, owns, the luxury-apartment complex to be known as 1700 Designer Residences, at 1700 Western Ave., “because that property is being developed,” Wolanin said at the meeting. Wolanin himself lives in Loudonville.

He uses the trailers to store the World War II vehicles that he restores and shows at museums, in parades, and at fairgrounds, and to store parts for those vehicles and others like them. “The main purpose of these trailers is to save history,” he said.

Wolanin said that the United States government “scrapped these vehicles — they gave them away, they melted them down.”

He said that the vehicles are “about education” and about allowing kids to “touch and feel history through them.”

Wolanin concluded by saying, “Turning this down would be like a slap in the face of the people of the Greatest Generation.”

Four neighbors spoke against the containers at the meeting, and Remmert said that the board had also received letters from two others.

One complaint was that Wolanin had, to make room for the containers, been cutting into the woods around his property that provided privacy to the neighbors.

Containers are referred to in the code as “temporary storage containers,” Remmert said, but if a variance were granted, it would be in effect “forever.” So even if Wolanin were to leave the area in the future and someone else were to buy the property, that new owner would have the right to place temporary storage containers on the property, again, “forever,” Remmert said.

He appreciates Wolanin’s efforts to save and restore these vehicles, Remmert said, but he added, “The contents of the containers — unless they were hazardous materials — don’t really affect our decision tonight.”

He noted that the proposed containers were four times the allowed number, and that each one was twice the maximum size.

McKownville is a residential neighborhood, said Remmert, and the dimensions would be “industrial in nature” and “cause an undesirable change in the nature of the neighborhood” and “set a dangerous precedent.”

The board voted unanimously to deny Wolanin’s request.

Acting Chief Building and Zoning Inspector Jacqueline Coons said that if Wolanin wanted to, he could apply for a permit for just one temporary storage unit of the allowed size, and there would probably be no need for him to come back before the board.

Coons told The Enterprise after the meeting that the problem arose when Wolanin moved the containers from 1700 Designer Residences to 12 McKown Road.

If he had left them where they were before the new code was adopted, “We couldn’t have done anything,” Coons said. “They would have been grandfathered in.” As soon as the containers left that property, they became subject to the new code, she said.

After the meeting, Wolanin was asked what he planned to do to store the vehicles. “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought they were grandfathered in.”

One storage unit would never be enough, Wolanin said. One of the vehicles alone, a World War II armored half-track, is 18 feet long.

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In other business, the board:

— Granted Matthew Blackwood a variance to place a freestanding carport in his yard at 4130 Becker Rd.; and

— Gave Antonino Aliberti a special-use permit to combine two buildings and lots, 1670 and 1672 Western Ave., into one mixed-use building lot.