The Township Council is beefing up its defense team, hiring a second lawyer to handle a lawsuit filed by a Muslim group alleging religious discrimination in a zoning battle over a proposed mosque.
The Al Falah Center filed its suit in April in federal district court in New Jersey, claiming that a township zoning ordinance was drafted with the sole purpose of preventing the group from turning a former 7.6-acre banquet hall property on Mountain Top Road into a house of worship.
The case, meanwhile, has caught the attention of the U.S. Justice Department, which has requested the township turn over copies of zoning documents and reports as part of a routine investigation into whether officials may have violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000.
A federal judge this summer denied the township’s motion to dismiss the suit.
Meeting Thursday morning in a conference room, the council voted 3-0, with two members absent, to hire Kevin J. Coakley and his associates of the Roseland firm Connell Foley at the rate of $275 an hour, not to exceed $50,000.
Coakley will join Howard D. Cohen of Mt. Laurel-based Parker McCay. Cohen was hired in May. The council agreed to spend up to $100,000 in legal expenses this year.
The zoning ordinance in question came after months of bitter Planning Board and council meetings, in which residents complained the mosque would overwhelm the tree-lined community with traffic.
Opponents were bolstered by Somerset County Tea Party founder Jim Lefkowitz, who used his website to encourage people to attend meetings and donate money to the Bridgewater group fighting the mosque application. Lefkowitz, who denied religion was factor in the debate, asked at one meeting whether the group had ties to a terrorist organization, which the group denied.
Township attorney William Savo, in recommending Coakley Thursday, noted that the Al Falah Center has four firms working on its behalf.
The center is represented by the firm Archer & Greiner of Haddonfield, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Brennan Center for Justice and Arnold & Porter of Washington, D.C.