A lawsuit filed in Nassau County Supreme Court this month is asking a judge to erase the village of Saddle Rock’s approval of the Saddle Rock Minyan reconstruction at 115 Greenleaf Hill. The petitioners want everything undone. That’s the short version.
The longer version is messier and potentially far more expensive for local taxpayers.
Concerned Citizens of Saddle Rock LLC and resident Sigalit Sanilevich filed what’s called a hybrid Article 78 proceeding, a legal maneuver that targets the village Board of Trustees’ February 4 decision to grant both a special use permit and site plan approval for the rebuild. Their attorney, Kenneth Allen Brown, argues the board acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” in granting that approval. Two claims drive the complaint, and neither one is trivial.
First, Brown’s petition charges that the village never ran a proper traffic study before signing off on the project, a step required under the State Environmental Quality Review Act. I’ve watched Long Island boards skip this kind of review before, and it always costs somebody something later. A 6,000-square-foot house of worship drops into a residential street. People show up for services. Cars need somewhere to go. The board’s job was to study whether the roads around Greenleaf Hill can actually handle that load. Whether they did that is now a question for Nassau County Supreme Court.
The second claim is the one that should have every property owner in Saddle Rock reaching for their file folders. Brown’s petition alleges that a 2014 local law, the very law the village used to calculate setback requirements on this project, was never filed with the New York Secretary of State. If that’s accurate, it’s not just a paperwork hiccup. A law that wasn’t properly filed isn’t a valid law. And if it isn’t valid, every building decision the village made against that standard over the past decade could theoretically be challenged. That’s 14 years of permits potentially sitting on shaky ground. Nobody in village hall appears to have an answer yet. Mayor Dan Levy and the Board of Trustees had not responded to the lawsuit before Long Island Press went to press.
Brown himself isn’t talking. He declined to comment on either the unfiled law question or the specific safety concerns laid out in the petition. That’s standard legal strategy. It doesn’t make the questions go away.
On the other side, the Minyan’s legal team isn’t staying quiet. Attorney Muhammad Faridi, in a statement to Great Neck News Record, called the petition’s “unlawful assembly” framing “simply detached from reality.” He said the congregation had gathered for years at the site with the village’s full knowledge and without any complaints. The lawsuit, Faridi argued, follows a “familiar pattern” of manufactured objections deployed whenever religious institutions try to put down roots in residential neighborhoods.
That framing matters legally. The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, enacted in 2000, was designed specifically to stop municipalities from weaponizing zoning codes against religious groups. If the petitioners can’t show that their procedural objections are genuinely about traffic and setbacks rather than about who’s worshipping at 115 Greenleaf Hill, federal law gives the Minyan a strong counter-argument. Courts take this statute seriously. So does the Justice Department.
The case has a history behind it too. The congregation has operated here since at least 2014, arguably longer depending on how you count informal gatherings. The village has been aware of it throughout. That’s not a small detail. It shapes the question of whether the board was doing genuine environmental and land-use review in February 2026 or simply ratifying something that had already been happening for years.
What this case will cost Saddle Rock in legal fees hasn’t been disclosed. The village hasn’t published any budget line for outside counsel on this matter. Residents may want to ask.
The Nassau County Supreme Court now holds the answers to at least four questions: Was the traffic study adequate? Was the 2014 law ever properly filed? If not, what does that mean for 115 Greenleaf Hill? And what does it mean for everyone else who built something in Saddle Rock since 2014?