By Ray Gronberg

gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648

DURHAM -- Four property owners have sued Durham County over its handling of a rezoning protest they say should have blocked elected officials' removal of watershed-buffer restrictions from land adjacent to Jordan Lake.

The lawsuit asks a Superior Court judge to rule that the Oct. 12 rezoning vote failed because it lacked the fourth vote needed for approval in the face of a formal protest.

Alternatively, the property owners suggest sending the matter back to County Commissioners for a new hearing, this time using the proper supermajority to judge whether the rezoning passes.

The lawsuit invokes state and local laws that allow the owners of land near tracts earmarked for rezoning to demand, by means of a petition, that commissioners muster four votes in favor of a zoning change instead of the usual three.

City/county planners originally ruled that the petition opponents of the Jordan Lake rezoning -- controversial because of its probable effect on a proposed high-density development along N.C. 751 -- turned in lacked the necessary signatures to make it valid.

But City/County Planning Director Steve Medlin on Nov. 18 reversed the original ruling, for reasons that officials have declined to disclose, arguing that they fall under the personnel-privacy exemptions to the state's public-records laws.

Other laws make it difficult for the commissioners to quickly revisit a zoning vote, so officials have held that opponents of the Jordan Lake rezoning have to go to court to undo it.

The four property owners believe they're "entitled to a declaratory judgment" in their favor, according to the lawsuit filed on their behalf by Raleigh attorney James L. Conner II.

A heavily redacted memo from Medlin indicated that one issue driving his reversal was the validity of the signature offered on the petition for the Kendrick Estates Investment Corp.

The Raleigh company owns some 279.5 acres west of the lake and is one of the landowners that joined the new lawsuit.

Also joining the lawsuit as plaintiffs were Milagros and Jeffrey Napoli, who also own land west of the lake, and Kristen Corbell, a resident of the Woodlands of Chancellor's Ridge townhomes across N.C. 751 from the development's likely site.

They and Kendrick Estates President William Few all signed the petition protesting the proposed rezoning.

Officials have indicated, however, that Medlin's November decision about the petition turns on whether signatures from the Chancellor's Ridge Homeowners Association on behalf of neighborhood common property bordering N.C. 751 are valid.

Medlin, in his memo, noted that the association's board acted without putting the issue to a homeowner vote. A "court will have to address" whether it had the power to do so, he said.

The lawsuit's filing is the second to grow out of the ongoing dispute over the zoning of the lake buffer.

Lawyers for the company that owns the proposed development site, Southern Durham Development Inc., have argued that their clients were entitled to a zoning change without a vote by County Commissioners, as former City/County Planning Director Frank Duke accepted a survey submitted by a previous landowner that suggested the lake's border was far enough away to eliminate the need for buffer restrictions.

That lawsuit remains pending.