The main prayer room, one of the two rooms continually rented by the Islamic Society of Greater Concord, is seen at East Concord Community Center on Wednesday night, May 31, 2017. An additional room is rented every Friday afternoon and for special events to accommodate additional members. (ELIZABETH FRANTZ / Monitor staff)
The main prayer room, one of the two rooms continually rented by the Islamic Society of Greater Concord, is seen at East Concord Community Center on Wednesday night, May 31, 2017. An additional room is rented every Friday afternoon and for special events to accommodate additional members. (ELIZABETH FRANTZ / Monitor staff)

The local Islamic society will have to provide more information to Concord’s zoning board before it’ll get a decision on its proposal to establish what would be the city’s first permanent mosque on North Main Street.

After an hour and a half of testimony in the jam-packed city council chambers Wednesday, the five-person board decided unanimously to table the application, pending further study on the impacts it may have on parking and traffic in the surrounding neighborhoods.

The Islamic Society of Greater Concord will have to hire an independent consultant to demonstrate that its 181 N. Main St. visitors wouldn’t spill into street parking on the adjacent Pearl Street for lack of room in the proposed 16-space lot.

In the meantime, Chairman Chris Carley announced, “We’ve decided firmly and decisively to do nothing.”

The Islamic society currently rents space on Eastman Street, where it sees a maximum of about 20 parked cars during the busiest Friday prayers and no more than nine on other days, attorney John Arnold said. He added that the society has a written agreement with its potential new neighbor, the First Congregational Church, to use the church’s 36-space parking lot on Washington Street on Fridays if needed.

“Even if the society is successful beyond its wildest dreams and doubles its membership, it still has more parking available to it than it needs to satisfy the demand,” Arnold said.

Jay Stewart, son of the current property owner, said the business employed 35 people on that property as recently as 2010, “which meant 35 cars were coming and going.”

“In addition to that, we had a box truck and we had 48-foot tractor trailer trucks coming in the morning and leaving in the afternoon,” he said. “It seems to me the neighborhood would be much relieved to have 20 cars compared to that.”

Linda Baines, co-president of the council at First Congregational Church, agreed about the noisy trucks previously and noted that the building’s current vacancy has attracted vagrants to sleep there.

“I think we would have much better neighbors with the Islamic society,” she said.

But others countered with concerns about adding traffic and overflow parking onto the narrow, one-way streets accessing the two parking lots.

An abutter, Benjamin Kelley, wrote a letter as testimony saying that “he strongly supports the Islamic society, but he has concerns regarding the gross lack of parking spaces and the number of parking spaces being only 16, where 251 are theoretically required,” according to Carley’s reading.

Arnold called the 251-space requirement “astonishing,” noting it was generated as a rough estimate based on the building’s size, since no floor plan was available to detail the size of the worship area, which is used as a variable in that calculation.

“From our perspective, we think the relevant numbers to consider are … what the parking demand for this use has historically been,” he said. “The parking survey you have shows the maximum number during the busiest times has been in the 20 range.”

Dick Lemieux, a retired highway engineer who lives on Washington Street, also said he felt the proposal would put a strain on parking and traffic in the neighborhood.

“As their membership grows, as their activities grow, there will be more and more traffic and more and more parking that will be pitting neighbors against neighbors,” he said.

Zoning board members shared uncertainty about the parking issue, with Rob Harrison saying it was a “huge issue” for him.

Another member, James Monahan, added, “I think we would have been better off, and I think the neighbors would have been better off, if there had been a floor plan, so we didn’t begin with this concept of 251 vs. 16. … I appreciate they’ve reached an agreement with the church for shared parking facilities, but I’d like a little more certainty with regard to that.”

Parking aside, the zoning board members agreed that the property is a difficult one and would likely require variances for almost any use.

“This is the most classic hardship property I could imagine,” zoning board member Jim Marshall said. “It has no frontage on a road, so any use there is going to create parking issues. … It’s not ideal, but I’m not sure in this tight area down here how you could get any better.”

The board ultimately voted to table the application until the Islamic society comes back with an independent study that details the traffic and parking impacts and a floor plan that will allow the city to precisely calculate what the ordinance demands.

“We’ve acknowledged that this building is going to require variances in order to be used,” Carley said. “We have not ruled out of hand that the Islamic society is not the right use for that space, but we do have concerns.”

(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at
@NickBReid.)