The South Valley Islamic Community has resubmitted plans to build a mosque, community center and cemetery in San Martin, more than three years after its previous proposal raised a stir among the rural unincorporated community’s residents.
The Santa Clara County Department of Planning and Development will host a public outreach meeting on the project, known as the Cordoba Center, 7 to 9 p.m. Feb. 25 at the Morgan Hill Community and Cultural Center, 17000 Monterey Road.
The applicant, SVIC, has applied for a use permit, architecture and site approval, grading approval, cemetery permit and environmental study to establish a “religious institution” on the 15.8-acre property at the corner of Monterey Road and California Avenue, reads a notice from the county.
The institution would include two buildings—a worship hall and a community center— as well as the burial site, according to SVIC spokesman Hamdy Abbass.
The project will require an Environmental Impact Report, which could take up to 12 months to complete, according to Santa Clara County Senior Planner Jim Reilly. He added that the latest application submitted by SVIC for the site is incomplete, and the EIR will not begin until after the application documents are finished.
After the draft EIR is complete, the public will get a chance to review it, and then it will go to the county planning commission for approval or rejection.
“We’re looking at a long timeline for this project,” Reilly said.
The SVIC submitted almost identical plans for a worship center at the same property in 2012. Before the Board of Supervisors approved the project, numerous public hearings and informational meetings on the plans drew scores of San Martin residents opposed to the Cordoba Center.
Many of these residents said they were concerned about the project’s potential impact on groundwater, traffic, storm runoff and other environmental concerns. Some opponents of the project openly voiced their hostility to and fear of Islam and its followers.
Surrounding the property is mostly rural residential uses on large lots. Across California Avenue from the proposed Cordoba Center site is the Ludewig Ranch tree farm and an AT&T utility service facility. A VTA bus stop is directly in front of the site on Monterey Road.
There is another large-scale project proposed by a different applicant next door to the Cordoba Center site: an RV park that would include 124 spaces for recreational vehicles, Reilly added. Residents have already raised concerns about the proximity of the Cordoba Center and RV park and the additional traffic and visits the two sites would bring to the area.
After the supervisors approved the Cordoba Center project 5-0 in September 2012, a group of residents calling themselves the “People’s Coalition for Government Accountability” filed a lawsuit demanding the county rescind the use permit. The suit claimed that the county did not take a full account of the Cordoba Center proposal’s potential impact on the nearby environment in accordance with state and federal laws that mandate such accountability.
The SVIC and county officials insisted the project approval followed exhaustive studies of the potential impact of the project. But the SVIC withdrew its plans in August 2013 in response to the lawsuit.
“We withdrew our plans because there was no correspondence back from the people that sued,” Abbass said. “They sued under the pretense that the county did not ask us to do the due diligence. We tried to talk to them, and there was no response.”
Abbass thinks the lawsuit was really about a group of residents “not wanting us to be there.”
Plans for the property have changed slightly since the SVIC originally submitted them in 2012, except this time the proposed facilities are “maybe a little bit larger,” Abbass said.
Previous specifications called for a 5,000-square-foot prayer hall, 2,800-square-foot multi-purpose hall, a two-acre cemetery and a children’s play area.
The county notice announcing the Feb. 25 meeting says the facilities will be designed to accommodate up to 300 people for scheduled religious services with “greater anticipated capacity for occasional special events.”
San Martin Neighborhood Alliance President Trina Hineser said SMNA members have not had a chance to formally discuss the project and form an opinion on it, but she hopes the SVIC communicates openly and punctually with the neighbors.
“The SMNA hopes the applicant for this project would be reaching out to us and engaging with us before it gets too far along,” Hineser said.
The SVIC represents about 80 families from San Jose to Hollister and beyond, and the Cordoba Center project is meant to serve their prayer and worship needs. SVIC members have also said the site could be available for community use through rentals for the future community center and special events sponsored by the SVIC.
