New York  - Libyan leader Moamer Gaddafi's scheduled visit to New York next month has stirred negative reaction from a small city in New Jersey, where Libya maintains a property that could accommodate Gaddafi's tent, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Gaddafi is known for his preference to live in a tent wherever he travels. He set up a tent in the garden of the Elysee Palace, the French presidential residence in Paris, in
2007 and in Rome's Villa Doria Pamphili in June this year.

But both the mayor of Englewood, New Jersey, and the East Hill Synagogue, which is situated near the Libyan residence in Englewood, do not like the idea of Gaddafi camping in the town of 26,000 inhabitants.

Libya reportedly had requested that Gaddafi set up his tent in Central Park in New York City, which was rejected.

Gaddafi is scheduled to attend the United Nations General Assembly's political debate opening on September 23 in New York. His decision to attend the 192-nation assembly, apparently for the first time, is because the new assembly president is his own countryman, Ali Treky, a former UN ambassador in the 1980s.

The report said Englewood's Mayor Michael Wildes would prefer that the Libyan property remains unoccupied. Libya bought the large piece of real estate in 1982 for 1 million dollars, but its top diplomats reside mostly in New York City.

"Our tent enforcement rules are laborious and tedious," Wildes told the Journal. "When you're putting up a Bedouin-style tent for a period of weeks, there's enough to warrant a more aggressive approach."

Gaddafi's attendance of UN meetings has stirred some uneasiness for the host country following the release this week of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, 57, the only Libyan accused of downing a Pan Am airliner in 1988 that killed 270 people, most of them Americans.

Al-Megrahi, who served eights years of a life sentence in Scotland, received a hero's welcome in Tripoli, which infuriated Washington and families of the victims. (dpa)