Yet Another Setback For Opponents to Sheepshead Bay Mosque
Opponents to a proposed mosque in Sheepshead Bay suffered yet another setback. The City’s Board of Standards and Appeals rejected the groups’ claims that the mosque’s design would lack the proper amount of parking spaces required under zoning law. Since the zoning law requires that houses of worship — mosques, churches, synagogues, or otherwise — provide one parking space for every 15 occupants of a site’s largest assembly room, or 9.2 parking spaces in the case of the Sheepshead Bay mosque. Facilities that are required to provide fewer than 10 spaces are exempt from the parking obligations altogether.
The opposition had claimed that a secondary space overlooking the main area was in fact part of the main space and therefore triggering the parking space obligation.
Had the opposition groups won, the mosque would not have been possible in the design configuration chosen because there would not have been sufficient parking.
The opposition groups have been fighting with the mosque in court too, although they haven’t fared any better there.
This isn’t the last we’ll hear of the mosque project…