By Ray Gronberg

gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648

DURHAM -- Survey lines aren't usually the stuff of political controversy, but 2009 was no ordinary year for Durham County government or for the future of south Durham near Jordan Lake.

County Commissioners battled for much of the year on whether to accept a privately funded survey's placement of the lake's boundary far enough to the west to remove watershed-buffer restrictions from a 165-acre tract along N.C. 751.

The dispute cost former County Attorney Chuck Kitchen his job, and led in October to a 3-2 rezoning vote by commissioners that was intended to formalize an administrative ruling made more than three years before by former City/County Planning Director Frank Duke.

The fight pitted a majority of the board led by County Commissioner Joe Bowser against local environmentalists, and sparked two lawsuits.

One, filed by the site's would-be developer, asked a judge to uphold Duke's original ruling. The other, filed by adjoining landowners, alleges that officials improperly invalidated a formal protest petition that would otherwise have required supporters of the rezoning to muster four votes on the commission for it.

The developers' lawsuit reached a judge recently and produced the ruling its filers wanted. Superior Court Judge Howard Manning held that Duke's ruling must stand, even in the face of the critics' lawsuit about the protest petition.

Manning also criticized the City/County Planning Department, saying its work in the matter was "botched all the way through, botched from start to finish."

The judge further noted that the October vote was far from the last word on the issue, never mind whether his ruling gets appealed by lawyers for the Haw River Assembly.

The site's owners, Southern Durham Development Inc., still have to convince local officials to rezone the property in a way that would allow high-density construction there.

The dispute to date has been about a separate zoning issue, buffers that restrict the amount of paving and other hard surfaces that can go in next to the lake.