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Photo by Jon Anderson
Nearly 200 people filled the Hoover Planning and Zoning Commission meeting at Hoover City Hall on Monday, Dec. 1, 2025, many in opposition to a proposal to allow the Islamic Academy of Alabama to relocate from Homewood, Alabama, to Meadow Brook Corporate Park in Hoover, Alabama.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
Nearly 200 people filled the Hoover Planning and Zoning Commission meeting at Hoover City Hall on Monday, Dec. 1, 2025, many in opposition to a proposal to allow the Islamic Academy of Alabama to relocate from Homewood, Alabama, to Meadow Brook Corporate Park in Hoover, Alabama.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
Nearly 200 people filled the Hoover Planning and Zoning Commission meeting at Hoover City Hall on Monday, Dec. 1, 2025, many in opposition to a proposal to allow the Islamic Academy of Alabama to relocate from Homewood, Alabama, to Meadow Brook Corporate Park in Hoover, Alabama.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
Nearly 200 people filled the Hoover Planning and Zoning Commission meeting at Hoover City Hall on Monday, Dec. 1, 2025, many in opposition to a proposal to allow the Islamic Academy of Alabama to relocate from Homewood, Alabama, to Meadow Brook Corporate Park in Hoover, Alabama.
The Hoover Planning and Zoning Commission on Monday night voted 7-0 against a proposal to allow the Islamic Academy of Alabama to relocate from Homewood to a vacant office building in Meadow Brook Corporate Park.
However, the zoning board does not have the final say in the matter. The K-12 school has the option to take the request to the Hoover City Council and will weigh that option to decide if it’s worth making the effort, school spokesman Lucas Gambino said.
Monday night’s vote by the zoning board came after the board heard staunch opposition from the surrounding community. Nearly 200 people filled the zoning board meeting at Hoover City Hall, and many stated adamantly that they don’t want a K-12 school in Meadow Brook Corporate Park.
One of the primary reasons cited was increased traffic.
Nancy Cooper, a resident of the adjacent Meadow Brook residential community, said there already are six schools with 5,631 students off Alabama 119 between U.S. 280 and Interstate 65 and two more nearby schools off Alabama 119 that feed traffic onto it.
The Islamic Academy of Alabama proposes to use a back entrance into the corporate park to tie into Alabama 119 across from Doug Baker Boulevard, and that area of the state highway is congested already, Cooper said. At certain times of the day, “it’s a parking lot. No one moves,” she said.
Jeff Wilson, a Meadow Brook resident who created a petition opposing the school that drew more than 1,700 signatures, said he’s not opposing the request because it’s a Muslim school. It’s because of adding another K-12 school will only negatively impact traffic. It took him 18 minutes to get 2 miles Monday, he said.
Mac Martin, Hoover’s city planner, said city staff did not recommend approval of the school’s request for several reasons.
One is that a school is not aligned with the goals of the city’s comprehensive plan, which states a desire for Meadow Brook Corporate Park to be converted into a mixed-use center for office, retail, restaurant and residential uses. The overall goal is to reinvigorate an old corporate park and enhance its appeal as an employment center, with a heavy focus on technology companies.
Also, the school, as a nonprofit entity, would not pay property taxes, while a for-profit entity likely would pay $88,000 a year in property taxes, Martin said.
Martin said city staff also had questions about the accuracy of the estimated traffic a school would generate there because of questions about the school’s capacity. Gambino said the school has 265 students now and conservatively estimates it might grow to 350 or 400 students at the new location, based off the percentage of the general population that is Muslim.
Martin said city staff believe it would not be wise to base potential school capacity off the current religious makeup of the community. It would be better to estimate the school’s capacity based on the size of the facility, and using current building code capacities for schools, a building of about 100,000 square feet could potentially hold up to 5,000 students, he said.
That potentially could generate a whole lot more traffic than the school is projecting, he said. Martin also said city staff still have questions about how many people could potentially use the community center that would be a part of the school and open to the community in general for prayer and special holiday events.
Also, because Alabama 119 is a state highway, city staff recommended that if the zoning board or City Council decided to grant permission for the school, such permission should be contingent on the Alabama Department of Transportation confirming the findings of the traffic study submitted by the school’s traffic engineer.
Noah Webster, a resident of the Broken Bow community, said most of the schools in the area draw from the residential communities there, but the Islamic Academy of Alabama would be pulling more people who live outside the community into this area.
Tim Harris, another resident of the area, said it’s true there are a couple of other schools in Meadow Brook Corporate Park, but one is a preschool and the other is a school for deaf children, and both have 30 or fewer students. That doesn’t compare to a full K-12 school, he said.
Rex Blair, a Greystone resident who sits on the Hoover Board of Education, said the Islamic Academy of Alabama also is approved as a “school choice” school by the state, and, as such, would drain resources from the Hoover public school system, which would be forced to provide certain assistance to students who attend there.
One Hoover woman who said she recently moved to the United States from the United Kingdom argued that Muslim people do not assimilate into other countries’ cultures well, saying that British people bent over backward to accommodate the Muslim community’s demands and it ended up negatively affecting the community as a whole.
Hoover zoning board Chairman Mike Wood said those kind of comments were irrelevant and inappropriate and made the woman sit down, though many people in the audience applauded what the woman had to say.
Another man said bringing an Islamic school and community center into the Hoover community would only draw more foreigners into the city and lead to influx of people who would create problems. One woman in the audience held a sign that read “Stop the 100-year plan,” referring to a plan by the Muslim Brotherhood, a militant Islamist organization, with a goal of slowly infiltrating non-Muslim countries, taking them over and imposing sharia law.
SCHOOL RESPONSE
Gambino, in an effort to address city staff’s concerns, said if the city is concerned about the potential number of students at the school, the school would be happy to put a cap on the number of students allowed and subject itself to reporting and audits by the city.
Also, Gambino and the school’s traffic engineer said a school would generate less traffic than an office building would. Furthermore, while the school would not pay property taxes, only 46% of those property taxes would go to the city of Hoover, Gambino said.
And school officials project that people associated with the school (parents and faculty), would generate $2.5 million a year in additional retail and restaurant sales in the area, which should more than offset any loss in property taxes, Gambino said.
He also noted that a school is specifically allowed in Meadow Brook Corporate Park as a conditional use and said the city’s comprehensive plan doesn’t trump the zoning code.
Also, it would be wrong to deny the school permission to come to Meadow Brook Corporate Park because of a desire for that space to be filled by a technology company instead, Gambino said. That’s a very “aspirational” goal, but there is plenty of vacant office space in Hoover and in the U.S. 280 corridor, and it doesn’t appear that a lot of tech companies are forcing people to come back into offices after the pandemic, Gambino said.
Tom McLeod, CEO of the McLeod Software company that bought and renovated one of the large office buildings in Meadow Brook, said the idea of converting Meadow Brook Corporate Park into a tech hub is already underway. His company, which employs 570 people (420 of whom live and work in Hoover), has spent $9 million over the past two years refurbishing their building in preparation for that continued expansion. And he has called his employees back into the office after the pandemic, he said.
He strongly urged the zoning board to deny the request for the school to give the “Tech 280” project a chance to succeed.
Ben Wieseman, the zoning board member who made the motion to deny the school’s request to be allowed in Meadow Brook Corporate Park, said a key factor for him was that the plan for a school doesn’t align with the city’s comprehensive plan.
The burden of proof was on the school to show how its plan deserves a “conditional use” exception to be in an office park. He asked the school representative how the school’s plan to locate in the back of the office park addresses and grows the city’s aspirations for the park to become a tech center. The school’s representative failed to show that, he said.
There also were a myriad of issues regarding the accuracy of the traffic study, which is a critical sticking point for the community, Wieseman said. Wieseman praised city staff for working with school officials over the past several months to try to get answers to questions.
