Oyster Bay seeks to postpone Bethpage mosque trial
The parking lot outside the Masjid Al-Baqi mosque in Bethpage earlier this summer. Oyster Bay Town parking guidelines have been front and center in the controversy surrounding a planned expansion by the mosque. Credit: Newsday/Drew Singh
Lawyers for a Bethpage mosque are opposing Oyster Bay's request to delay the start of a trial over the town's decision to deny the house of worship's expansion plans.
Owners of the Masjid Al-Baqi mosque have for years attempted to triple the footprint of its facilities on Central Avenue to better serve its congregants. In a lawsuit filed against Oyster Bay in January, attorneys for the mosque said the town violated federal religious land use laws in issuing the denial. The lawsuit accused the town of treating religious institutions differently than secular facilities, but town officials said they had legitimate concerns about the effect of the expansion on traffic and safety.
The two sides are now at odds over the scheduled Oct. 27 trial date.
Attorneys for Oyster Bay said they have had to contend with the “highly compressed” legal obligations over a short time period, forcing its team to work during Jewish High Holidays. The town doesn’t believe “justice nevertheless requires that the trial commence on Oct. 27, 2025,” lawyers for Oyster Bay said in an Oct. 10 court filing.
The town said it "should not be prejudiced for relying on counsel who observe and celebrate the Jewish holidays, or because the Town did not hire a large law firm to compete or keep up with the extraordinary level of legal work generated by Plaintiffs’ counsel."
In a response filed Sunday, lawyers for the mosque said the town’s “eleventh-hour request” to delay the trial was improper.
“Every day that passes is another day Plaintiffs are denied their right to worship freely,” the mosque's attorneys wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge Sanket J. Bulsara. The letter said the trial should not be delayed “simply because the Town failed to manage its case.”
The case has proven contentious over the course of the past year.
In August, Oyster Bay agreed to a proposed settlement that would require it to pay $3.95 million to the mosque and approve the expansion, among other concessions. But days later, the town withdrew from the settlement.
A key part of the mosque's case is a 2022 town law that changed parking requirements for religious institutions, while the town was actively reviewing the expansion plan.
That new law required one parking space for every three people at houses of worship, causing the number of required spaces for the Bethpage mosque’s expansion to rise significantly, lawyers for the mosque have argued.
Earlier this month, the town changed its parking code to bring the formula calculating the number of required parking spaces for secular buildings in line with the calculations for religious institutions.
Last week, town officials said they fired a traffic consultant after learning he had made anti-Muslim comments on a social media page, Newsday reported.
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