The Corvallis City Council is indeed taking a calculated risk by sending a Salem development company back to square one regarding its plans for the Seventh Street Station.

In a 5-4 vote, the council Monday approved removing the "residential" zone change from the property. It now reverts to industrial zoning.

The area was zoned that way until 2003, when a laborious public process layered conditions on the development, and the zoning change to residential was approved. Known by the jargon-y phrase "planned development overlay," this process is primarily a compromise between the neighbors, who will live with the planned development, and the property owner, who can move forward with development.

Of course, this is essentially a property rights debate between who should have the greater legal authority: The property owner who is seeking to materially change an area in which other property owners already have invested, or the ones who were there first?

We have zoning precisely to give property owners of both sorts some assurances about once and future development. That's prudent. It's what prevents the homeowner who buys and restores an old Victorian house from seeing, say .. a rendering plant move in next door.

But what about seeing a 200-unit condominium?

Well, the residents in the historic area west of the Seventh Street area decided that they would rather live with a railroad switching yard than live with the traffic, noise and high density of the condos that they feared would follow.

However, what residents didn't know at the time was that, starting in 2000, a group of real estate development interests were lobbying the Legislature to push for "streamlining" some land use laws that they thought stood in the way of implementing Goal 10 of Oregon's land-use laws - assuring adequate housing. Imposing "planned development overlays" was seen as a major hurdle.

Now this is where the issues gets argumentative, as differing interests take various views on the question of how much housing is adequate and where it should be located. The Legislature ultimately decided that developers could ask to have any "planned development overlays" they deemed burdensome removed.

That was sneaky business, and it is mystifying that nobody seemed to know about it during the PDO hearings and meetings in 2003. In any case, the result is that the neighbors thought they had cobbled a deal with the developer years ago. Then the development company learned that the legislature had changed the rules, enabling the company to yank the PDO out of the equation. That move essentially told the neighbors "Too bad for you."

That the majority of the council decided to revoke the zoning change - the other condition that was part of the deal - seems only fair, even if it likely will mean a test in court.

Some things are worth testing, and the extent to which local governments and residents have a right to shape their city and surroundings is one of them. Corvallis is unique in how much we love our public process, and we need to know whether that process still has a tangible, legal value in court.

It's time we tested to what extent those land use laws and local development codes still have a say in how our landscape changes.