Oyster Bay owes $5 million in fees for Bethpage mosque lawsuit, town records show

Oyster Bay owes more than $5 million in legal fees to resolve a federal lawsuit that challenged its decision to deny a Bethpage mosque's expansion plans.

An arbitration decision on Dec. 11 determined the town's liability for legal fees was $5,029,199, according to the Oyster Bay resolution. The town's insurance carrier will pay $2.5 million of that total, leaving Oyster Bay with a balance of nearly $2.53 million, according to the resolution.

The town in October agreed to settle the lawsuit with the religious organization Muslims on Long Island, which owns the Masjid Al-Baqi mosque on Central Avenue. The owners sued the town in January after Oyster Bay denied the mosque's application to roughly triple in size.

The organization had sought to knock down two separate facilities on the property and build a single one with a bigger prayer room as well as new wudu stalls for ritual washing. In defending their denial, Oyster Bay officials cited concerns about increased traffic in the area.   

After months of debate, the town board in October approved a scaled-back plan.

The town board authorized the legal payment during a special meeting on Tuesday by a vote of 7-0. The money will come from the town's general fund, said Brian Nevin, a town spokesman.

“Litigation produced meaningful results for the Bethpage community, securing critical safety improvements such as enhanced crosswalks, a traffic caution light, applicant-funded crossing guards, and additional on-site parking,” Nevin said in a statement.

Linklaters LLP, the firm that represented the mosque in the case, declined to comment. Representatives for Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, a law firm that also represented MOLI, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

August switch

The town agreed to a settlement in August, but backed out of the plan days later, creating a political firestorm in the community and new a wave of contention.

Under the August agreement, Oyster Bay would have approved the original 16,000-square-foot building plans and paid $3.95 million, a sum that included legal fees.

The town's insurer, the Greenwich Insurance Co., would have covered $2 million of that total, Nevin said Friday, leaving the town with a responsibility of $1.95 million under that scenario.

The settlement struck in October limited the house of worship to a total size of 9,950-square-feet at ground level or above, 1,100 square feet less than the original request. Mosque officials also agreed to limit occupancy to 295 people, below the original request of 464.

The settlement required the mosque pay a crossing guard for 18 months and work with the town to establish safety measures such as an enhanced crosswalk and new caution light, according to town documents.

The town resolution said Oyster Bay would pay $468,296 to the Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler law firm and $2,060,903 to Linklaters.

Parking rules debated

Lawyers for the mosque had accused the town of holding religious facilities to a more stringent standard than secular ones.

In 2022, while the mosque plan was under review, Oyster Bay altered the parking space requirement for religious facilities. The calculation based parking spaces on a religious building's total occupancy, rather than square footage or number of seats. That amounted to a more onerous standard for houses of worship, the mosque's lawyers argued in court.

The U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division agreed, siding with the mosque in April. Lawyers for the Justice Department said the town's 2022 law treated religious institutions "less favorably than comparable secular uses such as theaters, libraries, and museums."

Lawyers for the town and MOLI engaged in a costly back-and-forth for much of the past year. Oyster Bay racked up $387,000 in outside legal fees between January and August defending the lawsuit.

Heated debate, accusations

While the case never went to trial, the litigation featured heated disagreements. Much of the sparring played out in depositions, court transcripts show.

Over the summer, lawyers for the mosque accused the town of inventing a fictitious grandmother's testimony to bolster its decision to deny the expansion. The town denied that claim and said the grandmother was Nassau County Legis. Rose Marie Walker (R-Hicksville).

In October, the town fired a traffic consultant hired to review the mosque's expansion for posting anti-Muslim comments on a social media page, Newsday has reported.

In early October, the town changed a zoning law at the center of the dispute. The changes forced secular facilities to comply with the stricter parking rules. That obliged libraries, theaters and museums to follow the same rules. 

But in late October, on the eve of the trial, the town struck a deal allowing the mosque to expand — on a smaller scale — while extracting concessions for new safety measures around the facility. 

By Joseph Ostapiuk

joseph.ostapiuk@newsday.com@OstapiukJ