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The people of Guilford County have a choice: We can add to the nascent Haw River State Park along our northern border or allow instead the development of a gated community and exclusive golf course on land that could be part of the park.

The decision will be made by our elected representatives on the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, most likely at a meeting Oct. 18. The commissioners work for us, or at least they are supposed to, and if enough people speak clearly on a simple up-or-down rezoning proposition, then our representatives might actually listen.

The land in question is a nearly 700-acre parcel on the border of Guilford and Rockingham counties. Traversed by the headwaters of the Haw in what was until roughly the day before yesterday a rural area, the property is adjacent to the grounds of the former Episcopal Diocese conference center in Browns Summit, itself a key building-block of the newborn park. Without this additional piece, the park is compromised from the start.

A development company from Florida, Bluegreen Corp., bought the land before local preservationists could get their acts together. Guilford County officials, disregarding their own guidelines for development along the Haw, rezoned the land in August and approved the project, dubbed Patriot's Landing. That rezoning has been appealed, and that appeal will be considered at the upcoming meeting.

Therein lies the choice and the chance to make a decision that will resonate into the future. We can open a vital bit of our vanishing natural landscape for public use, creating a legacy for generations, or we can lock it away for the pleasure of a few, remaking yet another expanse of countryside into suburbia. The Haw can continue to flow freely down to Jordan Lake and then on to its merge with the Deep River to form the Cape Fear, or it can have 100,000 gallons of water sucked from it each day to keep a private golf course green.

Sound like a no-brainer? It gets better: the state of North Carolina has funds available to purchase the land for the park, and budgeted for just this kind of project. Bluegreen would get its money back. That's important: Guilford County should be seen as an attractive place to invest and build. But it should also be a great place to live. In the long run, a green Guilford will be more valuable to all of its citizens.

Lewis Ledford, director of the N.C. Division of Parks and Recreation, wrote to Guilford County Manager David McNeil last month, stating his support for the appeal. He said, "Decisions made now reach beyond the fate of a single subdivision and concern the important balance of economic development and conservation as well as quality of life." That makes recent remarks by McNeil, who spoke to the Reidsville Review in terms of tax revenue generated by the proposed project, seem penny wise and pound foolish. There will be other high-dollar developments to tax, but land along the river has a unique and specific value.

The Patriot's Landing deal is even worse for Rockingham County, which would see little tax revenue from the handful of homes on its side of the border yet get stuck with a sewage-treatment plant in the bargain. Our neighbors to the north could vote against the project, but stopping it ourselves would say a lot of good things about Guilford County.

I have been fortunate to spend a lot of time in the neighborhood of the new park, frequenting a nearby farm that has been in a friend's family for well over 200 years. I've passed hours in those woods, seen beaver and foxes and hawks, hiked along the streams that meander toward the Haw. The land is much as the first European settlers in the Piedmont might have seen it, and the Indians before them. It is a refuge and a resource to be treasured and protected.

Wouldn't it be great if we could offer that kind of timeless experience to our children and their children?

We can, if our elected officials act in our best interest next month.

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.