The sale of Eagle Elementary School should be a fait accompli, a $1.1 million real estate deal that closed more than a year ago, creating a new home for the Islamic Cultural Association and a funding bonus for the Farmington School District.
Instead, the 2011 sale has spawned a prolonged and explosive controversy over the Islamic group’s plans for a new mosque and minaret and rattled West Bloomfield’s sense of itself as a tolerant and diverse community.
Long home to the Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit and the Chaldean Cultural Center, dozens of churches and synagogues, a vibrant and growing African-American population and other minorities, this was a community where cultures melded.
Now, you can knock on doors near the school and hear anger and fear.
“Instinctively, it doesn’t feel right,” says Susan Fermanian, an owner of the Franklin Tailor Shoppe, a storefront on Middle Belt at 14 Mile across from the proposed mosque. “Our family is Armenian and we escaped that part of the world. We don’t feel these people (the Islamic group) are being truthful.
“A lot of people don’t want to say how they feel,” she adds. “It’s not politically correct, but I don’t care.”
The Thomas More Law Center upped the ante of fear and mistrust earlier this month, issuing press releases that cited the ICA’s alleged “terrorist ties,” describing itself as litigators against radical Muslim “infiltration” and asking state Attorney General Bill Schuette to launch an investigation.
(A spokesman for the attorney general would not comment.)
Next month, the Michigan Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in a case filed by residents against the Farmington School District. (The district includes a small piece of West Bloomfield.) “They’re creating a very destructive message within the community,” says Sue Survalec, the Farmington Schools superintendent, describing the Ann Arbor legal group’s efforts to fan the issue of purported terrorist links.
But in a 22-page letter, the Thomas More lawyers also raise substantive questions that residents also have raised regarding the school district’s procedures.
Survalec and the district’s lawyer, Amanda Van Dusen, say the district has discretion to dispose of its property and that the law was strictly followed. When an unsolicited offer came in from the ICA in January 2011, the district decided to reconsider its position.
The district subsequently ordered an appraisal and negotiated the sale with the ICA, without inviting other bidders. The district wasn’t required to bid out the property — but other potential buyers, including a synagogue congregation and a pastor of a church, had been told the property wasn’t for sale only months before.
Van Dusen says she’s “extremely comfortable with the process.” Would more transparency and an open bidding process have changed the outcome?
It would have made moot charges of secrecy, back-room dealings and bribery. The aura of public mistrust, though, has not deterred the ICA or derailed its planning process.
Firas Nashef, a dentist and ICA past-president, says the group is working with architects and engineers to meet new environmental regulations and finalize architectural plans to add 13,102 square feet for a mosque, lobby and multipurpose room.
Nashef, who says the ICA includes about 150 people, describes growing families with greater needs, and says the mosque hopes to invite its neighbors in.
Dan Blugerman, the commercial real estate broker involved in the sale, says as far as he’s concerned, the story is over.
“There’s no ‘these people.’ I’ve been working with this group for almost two years. They’re doctors, dentists, hard-working, well-educated professionals.”
And despite the new challenges by the Thomas More Law Center, Nashef — who came to the United States from Damascus — embraces traditional American values.
He recognizes an America that’s a refuge, land of opportunity and above all, a place where, ultimately, a deal is a deal.