I am writing in response to Jim Wise's article about the Durham County commissioners possibly accepting as an official planning document a re-measurement of the level of Jordan Lake commissioned and paid for by a developer with a large financial interest in the outcome ("Lake talks spill over county line," DN March 15).

I have for many years chaired the New Hope Creek Corridor Advisory Committee and have also had 40 years experience as a researcher and teacher of land-use policy. This is not an official communication by the committee -- our mandate is to advise on implementation of the 1992 New Hope Plan, which ends north of I-40 -- but there has been unanimity at committee meetings in urging me to communicate it to the commissioners.

The regulation of the use of private land in furtherance of larger public interests (including the protection of other private property) is one of the most important of all the functions of local government. More than 80 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court (see Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon; Hadacheck v. Sebastian) allowed non-federal units of government to regulate private land, despite the Fifth Amendment protection of property rights. This regulatory power, as defined and upheld in tens of thousands of subsequent court decisions, brings with it great responsibilities, both procedural and substantive.

It is quite clear that protection of a municipal water supply is a legitimate reason to regulate land use. City and county governments in both Durham and Orange counties have carefully regulated land, and expended several millions of dollars, to protect the upper New Hope watershed, including such tributaries as Mud Creek, Sandy Creek and Dry Creek. As a result of this action, the quality of the New Hope as it flows out of our jurisdictional area is far better than it would have been absent these actions, taken over the past 17 years in manner that has been remarkably consistent with the New Hope plan.

The possible adoption of a privately done land study as an input to regulation of other important water sources to Jordan Lake strikes me as shockingly inconsistent with the fair and deliberate way in which other lands have been regulated, in Durham and in other parts of the state and the nation. It is not for the regulated entity to decide what the public interest is and how it should be protected. It is the power and duty of government, and government alone. It is the fundamental use of fair procedures and impartial identification by government of constraints such as floodplains, slopes and distance to water bodies that gives legal power and moral authority to the government's infringement of private property rights in the interests of the public as a whole.

I hope the Durham County commissioners will reject the developer-financed survey, and (if there is any doubt about the Jordan Lake pool height) conduct an impartial government-directed study, perhaps in collaboration with the several other units of government (e.g. Orange and Chatham counties) that also have regulatory responsibility for the watershed and that also protect the public interest.