The Orange Economic Development Commission's Bryant Colson and Anita Badrock wrote a recent guest column (May 21) promoting the proposed Buckhorn Village project. Many have worked for years to put this plan together and many others hope it will benefit the county's tax woes.

But with energy forecasts predicting $3 gas will soon be wistful nostalgia, the Buckhorn Village concept reminds me of the kind of corporate thinking that kept building Hummers as the market was shifting to hybrids. Remember when businesses were being given huge tax deductions for SUVs over 6,000 pounds? Prime short-term thinking.

The Village may help with our tax problems in the short-term, but will further lock us for years into the same old model of drive-by commerce that makes our everyday lives so dependent on oil. Seems like a lot to pay for $3 million in taxes. The oil execs must surely be scratching their heads over how we can rail at them over their windfall profits when we keep building our towns this way. So why do we do it?

The 130-acre, 1.1 million-square-foot, mixed-use project is being presented to Orange County Planning by the Buckhorn Road Associates, which consists of three Orange County developers: Meadowmont builder Roger Perry of East West Partners; Tryon Investment Group, led by the new Hillsborough Weaver Street's builder George Horton; and John Fugo's Montgomery Development Carolina Corp, one of the Southern Village builders.

The Economic Development Commission's main selling points for this project are tied to the county's search for new revenue sources since the transfer tax idea bombed, and to the "retail leakage" problem that I think has to do with my teens' perception that all the cool clothes are in Durham County.

New jobs, while significant they say, are a less urgent need for the county than diversifying the tax base to the tune of maybe $3 million in commercial property and sales taxes. They hope commuters and tourists passing through will bring in most of the sales taxes.

Meanwhile, many other long-range planners are working to make the single-occupancy car commuter a rare species. The latest recommendations of the Special Transit Advisory Committee show a transit junction at the Interstate 85 intersection with N.C. 86, tying Hillsborough and Chapel Hill together.

With a stronger link to transit and rail junctions in an area that already has water and sewer, investing in this Hillsborough Area Economic Development District would serve our future economic health much better than bringing new water and sewer to a relatively undeveloped rural area outside of Mebane. This transit corridor will become even more important as Carolina North takes shape.

Even though the county has had the Buckhorn EDD on its map for decades, and the local developers have invested in the land for the Buckhorn proposal, it's now looking as if the larger picture is changing -- the old assumptions giving way. We need to face the new energy realities squarely and push the county to specify that development on this scale be tied intimately to transit and that it not depend on car traffic for its financial outlook.

What's the point of spending millions of dollars on rail and bus transit if our comprehensive plans continue to allow residential and commercial development to spread out in ways that don't make it easy for folks to use it?

Another big question is what price downtown Hillsborough and Chapel Hill will pay for this kind of center? The downtown vacancy rate in Chapel Hill is at about 9 percent. Current retail space is probably close to 2 million square feet. Approved and proposed projects in Chapel Hill will add about 600,000 square feet in retail. Buckhorn Village's three districts would add another 950,000 square feet of retail space alone, not to mention hotel, residential and office.

Now I'm no businessman, so I guess it's harder for me to see how all of these businesses can thrive with such an increase in retail shopping. It just doesn't seem that our local developers are truly on the same page as our downtown partnerships. I'd be interested to hear a little less PR spin from our Economic Development Commission folks and a little more on how these conflicts might play out. For example, Durham has the kind of malls -- uh, I mean tax base -- the Economic Development Commission would like to see here, but what is their retail vacancy rate downtown?

It's interesting to imagine a retail center at I-85 and N.C. 86 hybridized with a regional transit transfer station with a park-and-ride lot for commuters south and east, as well as a circulator bus to downtown Hillsborough, Sportsplex, Home Depot center, and back. The Economic Development Commission would be wise to encourage development at this planned transit juncture to increase the success of these investments, and help us from being stuck with a Hummer.

The problem I see is how to do that without creating vacancies elsewhere, with the lost tax revenue that might entail.