Muslims Sue Over Denial of Bid to Build Mosque in New Jersey Suburb
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The Planning Board members present at the meeting voted unanimously, 6-0, to deny final site plan approval for the project, first submitted for approval in 2012 by the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge.
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Residents applauded board member Barbara Kleinert's comments that the plan shouldn't even receive preliminary approval;
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Loretta Quick, an immediate neighbor of the four-plus-acre site on which the mosque has been proposed at 124 Church St. She added she was glad that so many people had turned out for the meeting.
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In a prosperous New Jersey suburb about an hour west of Manhattan, a retired AT&T executive decided with some friends to open a mosque in the town where he has lived for nearly 40 years, been on the board of education, led a task force to create the town’s community center and even served as mayor.
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Township resident Lori Caratzola, who has attended meetings since conceptual plans were presented by the ISBR almost four years ago, said she was "pleasantly surprised" by the vote.
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Board President Jeffrey Plaza said.
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About 65 people attended the congregation’s Friday prayer services, which were held in rented halls or sometimes in parks.
On the surface, the process seemed straightforward: In November 2011, the group, the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge, led by the former mayor, Mohammad Ali Chaudry, bought a four-acre plot in an area of Basking Ridge where zoning permitted houses of worship. The group’s architects and engineers argued that the plan complied by a wide margin with every conceivable building requirement.
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To avoid the kind of vitriolic dispute that erupted in a nearby town when a different group tried to build a mosque, the society said, it tried to minimize features that might be seen as ostentatious. The mosque would not have a dome, and its minarets would be styled like chimneys of nearby homes, at heights lower than the steeples of the churches in town. In all, the building would be 4,252 square feet. Within it would be a prayer hall of about 1,600 square feet with room for 150 people.
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At Ms. Caratzola’s urging, the township also doubled to six acres the land required for houses of worship, drastically increasing their costs.
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After presenting the plan to the board in early 2012, Mr. Chaudry, who has a Ph.D. in economics from Tufts University, predicted that the mosque would be built within the year.
What followed were 39 public hearings, and nearly four years of demands by town officials and planning board members for one change after another. Each solution proposed or agreed to by the Islamic Society led to objections on other grounds. Often, members of the public raised issues — some saying that a bucolic area was not the right setting for a mosque, or that it might interfere with a volunteer fire department station across the road.
A leading opponent of the mosque project, who has said that Islamic Shariah law is “one of the greatest threats to American values and liberties,” led a relentless campaign of challenges to virtually every aspect of the project.
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The application to build the mosque was finally denied in December by the planning board of Bernards Township, which includes Basking Ridge. The site remains as it was when the Islamic Society bought it in 2011.
In a lawsuit filed on Thursday in federal court, the society accused the planning board of breaking a law unanimously passed by Congress in 2000 protecting houses of worship from being unduly burdened by land use regulations. In a 111-page complaint, the Islamic Society said the decision also violated the rights of its members to freely practice their religion and to enjoy equal protection of the law.
“What should have been a simple board approval for a permitted use devolved into a Kafkaesque process,” said the suit, filed on behalf of the society by Adeel A. Mangi of the Manhattan law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler. “These proceedings took place against a backdrop of ugly spectacle.”
Lori Caratzola, a resident of Basking Ridge who opposed the mosque, attended virtually all the hearings and regularly put questions to the technical witnesses, said that the board had made a sound decision, strictly on land use grounds. Although she is not named as a defendant in the suit, her affiliations with anti-Islamic groups and websites are cited. “I stand by that,” Ms. Caratzola said when asked about her support for the American Public Policy Alliance, which maintains that American legal institutions are under threat from Islamic codes.
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At Ms. Caratzola’s urging, the township also doubled to six acres the land required for houses of worship, drastically increasing their costs.
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Bernards Township Planning Board Denies Mosque Plan Before Packed Crowd of Basking Ridge Residents
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