The North Hempstead Town Board is set to vote Wednesday on a resolution that would grant conditional approval to the Hillside Islamic Center’s long-contested expansion in New Hyde Park, Nassau County.
The vote, scheduled for April 15, would reverse a January 2024 denial and give amended site plan approval to a project that has generated lawsuits in both state and federal court, cost the town and the mosque significant legal fees, and left a congregation waiting years to expand a building it argues it legally outgrew.
The proposed expansion is modest by any measure. About 6,600 square feet of additional space. Sixty-three new parking spots. The zoning board had already recommended approval, and the project required no variances under town code. The town board denied it anyway, in January 2024, after a bruising stretch of public hearings.
What followed was predictable to anyone who has watched municipalities try to use procedural tools to block religious institutions from building what the law allows them to build. The center filed suits in both state and federal court, the latter in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, alleging the town had improperly used zoning authority to obstruct religious exercise. The federal complaint cited the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, along with First and Fourteenth Amendment protections. Separately, an Article 78 proceeding produced a January 2025 ruling by the Nassau County Supreme Court that overturned the denial outright. The town appealed that decision.
So the board is now negotiating its way toward approving something a court already told it to approve.
Umberto Mignardi, communications director for the town, said the resolution reflects months of work between municipal attorneys and the mosque’s legal team. “The parties are continuing to work toward a consent order, and while nothing has been finalized, there is agreement on the process for approving a revised site plan with conditions which will be submitted to the board,” Mignardi said. “We are optimistic that Wednesday’s vote will allow the process to move forward.”
He added that the talks have been collaborative. “Over the past month, all parties have engaged in negotiations with a clear willingness to address both the congregants’ and community’s concerns,” Mignardi said. “Any reconsideration is a reflection of this collaborative effort.”
The conditions attached to the approval center largely on parking and traffic management, the two issues that dominated public testimony during the original hearings. Among the proposed measures are managed parking protocols and the use of off-site spaces to reduce congestion during services. Whether those conditions satisfy the neighbors who pushed hard against the project at those 2024 hearings is a separate question the vote won’t settle.
What it might settle, at least in part, is the litigation. A consent order is still being finalized, which means both lawsuits presumably remain active until an agreement is signed.
The mosque’s leadership learned about the resolution when it appeared on the agenda, not from any direct communication from the town.
That detail says something.
Abdul Bhuiyan, chairman of the center’s Board of Trustees, kept his response measured. “It’s definitely a good move,” Bhuiyan told the Long Island Press. “We wish the town board had initially reached the same decision. It would have spared the community unnecessary distress, hardship and financial burden.”
Hard to argue with that. The zoning board said approve it. Town code required no variances. A state court overturned the denial. Two years of litigation, legal costs on both sides, and a congregation that couldn’t build what it was already entitled to build. None of that was inevitable.
North Hempstead isn’t alone in this pattern. Municipalities across the country have used parking requirements, traffic studies, and procedural delays as a slow-motion substitute for an outright “no” when it comes to houses of worship, particularly those serving minority religious communities. RLUIPA exists specifically because Congress recognized that pattern and decided federal law needed to address it directly. Courts have consistently held that zoning denials can’t function as a workaround for the First Amendment.
The Wednesday vote, if it goes as expected, won’t erase two years of cost and delay. But it does get the Hillside Islamic Center closer to the building it should have been allowed to start constructing in 2024.
The board meets April 15.