With less than a week left before the city zoning board decides whether to approve the plan for a Muslim community center, residents vehemently opposed to the project are putting up signs and organizing a protest at City Hall.

The signs -- which read "If the mosque comes, the mayor (goes)" and "No mas ('No more' in Spanish), no mosque" -- have been posted near the vacant warehouse where the community center would be located at the east end of 24th Street off Avenue F.

A flier for a Jan. 12 meeting of residents opposed to the community center featured a Sept. 11 logo with the word "remember" in block letters.

Joe Wisniewski, 50, of 23rd Street said he and other neighbors put up the signs, and that a grassroots movement of "at least 100" people are against the center primarily because they believe it would bring in additional traffic and noise.

"It's a quiet area. We don't want the cars coming and going at all times of the day, even if it's just on Friday when they have their main services," he said.

After years of searching for a permanent religious home, the local Muslim community has set its sights on converting the warehouse at 109 E. 24th St. into a community center that would offer, among other things, prayer halls, classrooms and a soup kitchen.

Wisniewski, who has previously suggested a Catholic church be built at the site instead of a Muslim community center, stressed that he and other residents opposing the project aren't doing so strictly on religious grounds.

"If it was ShopRite coming here, and they were building a store there, I would have the same concerns with parking, how many people are coming, how busy are they when they have their sales ... so there's a lot of issues there," he said.

Wisniewski added that his group believes the soil at the site may be contaminated, which would mean that construction shouldn't take place there.

In response to those concerns, Bill Finnerty of Bayonne-based law firm Hughes & Finnerty, who represents the Muslim nonprofit group that is seeking to build the center, said the project would bring a "minimal" increase in traffic, and that there is enough on-site parking for the people who would go to the center.

"There won't be any problems," he said. "These are quiet, peaceful people."

Finnerty said a 2013 environmental study determined that the property is clean, and that construction on the community center wouldn't involve digging into the soil anyway, since the renovations would be mostly cosmetic.

For the past seven years, the group has rented the basement of St. Henry's School at 28th Street and Avenue C for its activities, he said.

Finnerty said he knows that some opponents of the center are "using fear and terrorism and using the phrases of (Republican presidential hopeful) Donald Trump for their opposition."

Asked about the plan last summer, Wisniewski cited Trump's negative comments about Mexicans coming across the border. "People are coming across the border in Bayonne as well," Wisniewski said at the time.

Finnerty said he reached out to the neighbors to meet with the Muslim community a couple months ago, but that the neighbors did not take him up on that offer.

"They don't understand what the Muslim faith is about, and what these people are all about," he said. "Some of them don't want to know what the facts are."

A revised document on the group's website states that it provides services for about 150 worshipers, with over 200 attending Friday prayer, halving the figures that the same document provided last summer.

The group's revised objective states that it is looking for the new center to be able to hold 100 families; it previously described that figure as "approximately 1,000 worshipers."

Finnerty said the 1,000 figure refers to the number of people who might attend the annual celebration of the end of Ramadan in 16th Street Park, and not the number of people who would be going to the community center on a regular basis, which he estimated to be around 100.

While stressing that he doesn't want residents opposed to the center to be portrayed as objecting to Islam, Wisniewski said "there is a small fear factor involved as well."

"It'd be naive not to think that -- you know, wherever you hear about mosques, there's always issues. You always hear about things happening overseas. So that's always in the back of people's minds," he said.

While the group itself has referred to the project as a "mosque," Finnerty said it is more accurately called a "community center" because it will have classes and other services besides prayer services. On the project's zoning board application, it is referred to only as a "community center."

Wisniewski said he and other neighbors are inviting Donald Trump and political activist Pamela Geller to a demonstration they have planned for Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. in front of City Hall.

Alarmed by what they view as the anti-Muslim sentiment of some of the opponents of the center, some residents are organizing a counter-protest in support of the project.

Gene Woods -- a lifelong Bayonne resident, social studies teacher at Bayonne High School, and Holocaust studies scholar -- said the counter-protest will take place at the same time and place as the plan's opponents' protest.

After a public hearing in City Council Chambers begins at 6 p.m., the city zoning board is scheduled to decide whether to approve the plan for the Muslim community center.

City spokesman Joe Ryan said Bayonne Mayor Jimmy Davis has met with both supporters and opponents of the proposed center.

"The Zoning Board of Adjustment provides a proper legal channel for hearing this proposal and that process will be adhered to," Ryan said.

Asked about the opposition movement, he said everyone has a right to express their views.

Wisniewski and Finnerty both say they have received threatening messages because of their views on the community center.