Bayonne Zoning Board to resume hearing over mosque plan

Rasa - After being tabled a year ago, the proposal for a Muslim community center that would include a mosque has made it back onto the city zoning board's agenda for later this month.

News ID: 426383

Date: 09 January 2017 - 02:37

RBA - After being tabled a year ago, the proposal for a Muslim community center that would include a mosque has made it back onto the city zoning board's agenda for later this month.

Reasons for the hearing being delayed until 2017 included the local Muslim group's attorney unexpectedly needing back surgery; the group's decision to update the traffic and parking studies in its application; and routine scheduling conflicts with the zoning board, said the group's attorney Bill Finnerty.

The upcoming board meeting on Jan. 23 follows a meeting last year on Jan. 19 that drew spirited protests and counter-protests over the controversial community center.

In a sign of continued tensions since then, one city woman said in June that she was threatened by a stranger at her home for displaying placards in her windows that read "Save Bayonne" and "Stop the Mosque."

And in October, local Muslims arriving for prayer at their current place of worship -- the basement of a local Catholic school -- were met with anti-Muslim graffiti on the windows and walls outside the building.

The religious group's plan, which involves converting a warehouse at 109 E. 24th St. into a community center, has faced staunch opposition from a group of neighbors.

Some opposed to the plan have said they fear increased traffic and loss of parking in the area, while arguments by other critics are tinged with anti-Muslim sentiment.

A flier distributed last January for a meeting of residents opposed to the center featured a Sept. 11 logo with the word "remember" in block letters. In June, another flier asked, "Is there also an underlying plan to turn Bayonne's East Side into a closed Muslim community?"

Notwithstanding the controversy, Finnerty told The Jersey Journal yesterday that he is optimistic about how the upcoming meeting will go, saying the center would be a "beneficial use for the site."

Joe Wisniewski, a 23rd Street resident and outspoken opponent of the planned center, said this week that he is aware of the Jan. 23 meeting.

He said he isn't sure he will be organizing a protest prior to the meeting since doing so could prompt outside groups to come to the event and take up space, which he believes got in the way of city residents being able to attend the meeting last year.

In an interview about a separate 180-unit apartment building proposed for a site nearly adjacent to where the Muslim community center would go, Wisniewski attacked both of the projects as ill-fitting for the neighborhood.

A flier circulating Facebook that he said he created along with other concerned neighbors asserted in all caps that the two projects represented "massive over-development."

News of the upcoming Bayonne Zoning Board meeting comes days after a major new development in a separate mosque controversy elsewhere in the state.

In that case, a federal judge ruled that Bernards Township's insistence that a proposed mosque have more parking spaces than churches or synagogues is unconstitutional, NJ Advance Media reported.

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