The Los Gatos Town Council put off a contentious hearing on the appeal of a local mosque's conditional use permit yesterday, after both sides said they needed more time to sort through a tangle of public records requests tied to a sharply revised fire occupancy count. The mosque, run by the West Valley Muslim Association on Farley Road, is fighting 33 permit conditions attached to its expansion request, while a neighborhood group is pushing the town to reject the permit modification outright.
The council voted unanimously to grant the continuance, but declined to set a firm new hearing date, according to The Mercury News. Razi Mohiuddin, the association's founder, asked the town yesterday to continue the discussion into September. Town Attorney Gabrielle Whelan advised that locking in a date might not be feasible while staff works through the records requests, and Councilmember Rob Moore floated September 15 as a possible target, though no date was finalized.
At the center of the delay is a startling shift in how many people the Santa Clara County Fire Department says the mosque's building can safely hold. The department reassessed the site's occupancy limit from 1,214 down to 566 people last month, a change the mosque disclosed to the council. Mohiuddin told the council the facility's occupancy limit was 682 back in 1990, and said an occupancy calculator applying assembly-with-standing-space rules — which allow 5 square feet per person — would put capacity at 1,217 people across the mosque's three prayer halls, which together total 6,083 square feet.
Neighbors Demand Answers on the Numbers
James Ratcliff, speaking for the Farley Road Neighborhood Coalition, told the council the group wants building plans with room-by-room occupancy loads and calculations, along with an explanation for why earlier occupancy figures were apparently wrong. The coalition also requested communication records and site-visit documentation from 2025 and 2026. Moore said the appellants have asked for the fire department's occupancy study, building plans, and traffic studies, and town staff will need to obtain and review that material before releasing new staff reports to the public.
The coalition organized its opposition well before this week's hearing. Neighbors gathered more than 70 signatures on a petition in March raising safety concerns about vehicle congestion and blocked driveways on narrow residential streets that lack sidewalks, according to KTVU. Residents have said their opposition centers on traffic and quality-of-life impacts rather than the mosque's religious identity, and nearby residents have complained that mosque services disrupt their lives with vehicle noise and headlights at night.
What the Mosque Is Asking For
The West Valley Muslim Association, which operates Los Gatos's only mosque, applied in 2024 to update its conditional use permit so it could extend operating hours for morning, nightly, and Ramadan prayers. The permit modification sought to push daily closing times from 10 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. on standard days, with further extensions to 11:30 p.m. or midnight during Ramadan tied to seasonal sunset times, and it also asked for defined arrival windows up to 90 minutes before sunrise for Fajr prayers, the pre-dawn observance.
The Los Gatos Planning Commission approved the association's permit in April, but attached 33 conditions, including a requirement that the mosque renovate its parking lot within a year and a cap on occupancy tied to the number of available parking spaces. At its April 22 meeting, the commission also voted to restrict vehicle counts at the site to 180 during early morning and late-night hours, exempting only Ramadan nights — a condition mosque leadership opposed as an unprecedented burden not imposed on any other place of worship in town, per the Los Gatan. Mosque leaders challenged the commission's decision in June, arguing that some of the conditions substantially burden their ability to exercise their religion.
Civil Rights Groups and Town's Own Lawyer Raised Red Flags
The dispute has drawn outside civil rights scrutiny. The San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations submitted a letter in June urging the town council to overturn 19 of the 33 conditions, calling them unlawful under federal civil rights law and arguing that conditions unique to the mosque violate equal-treatment standards for houses of worship. Earlier, in April, the San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP warned town officials that restricting religious worship during Ramadan over traffic concerns fails to meet federal standards for burdening constitutional freedoms.
Even the town's own attorney flagged problems. Whelan told the Planning Commission in May that several draft conditions proposed for the mosque likely violated federal law by imposing discriminatory burdens, prompting staff and commissioners to attempt revisions before the panel's final vote. Under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, local governments cannot apply land-use regulations that substantially burden religious exercise unless the government proves the restriction is the least restrictive means of serving a compelling interest, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. The law also requires that religious assemblies be treated equally to secular facilities in the same zone.
Support for the mosque has extended beyond its own congregation. Local interfaith leaders, including Jewish community members from Silicon Valley, attended 2026 planning hearings to testify in favor of granting the permit modification, arguing Muslim residents should be able to fulfill daily prayer obligations without municipal hindrance. The Planning Commission held five extensive public hearings over several months on the conditional use permit before acting — a process without the statutory approval deadlines that apply to certain housing developments.
The Farley Road building has functioned as a place of worship since at least 1963, when it served as a Jehovah's Witness kingdom hall, before the West Valley Muslim Association acquired it in 2018. With no hearing date confirmed, the fight over the mosque's occupancy numbers and permit conditions now shifts to how quickly Los Gatos staff can process the coalition's records requests — and whether the town can craft conditions that satisfy both neighbors and federal law.
