"It's literal for me," said Jaloszynski, whose backyard runs right up against the proposed site of a new substation for the Bahama Volunteer Fire Department. "If the fire station was there, I definitely would not have bought my property."

Jaloszynski, whose back porch is just 150 feet from the proposed fire station's land, has emerged as one leader of a small band of residents of a moderately priced Treyburn subdivision off Stagville Road hoping to stave off the project.

While they say they appreciate the small, volunteer fire department and its commitment to this swath of rural northern Durham County, they feel the proposed new facility is too close to their quiet subdivision of tidy homes with well-kept lawns.

"Everybody here has become very accustomed to a quiet, peaceful lifestyle," Jaloszynski said Wednesday, standing in her backyard and looking at the small patch of woods separating her neighborhood from Stagville Road. "There's a difference, looking at your neighbor's house and looking at something with traffic in and out of it."

Residents of this neighborhood say they moved to this rural end of the county for the solitude and don't want to be bombarded with sirens and lights from fire trucks. But the Bahama department's chief says his agency wants the new facility for the good of the residents of that area.

Currently, some county residents pay more for insurance than they would if they had a fire substation within five miles of their homes, said Len Needham, the department's chief. Those residents would receive an insurance break, Needham said. In addition, the new substation would provide coverage for the large companies in Treyburn Corporate Park, and some residents have said they feel the industrial park is driving the need for the new station.

Not so, said Needham.

"I don't look at the industrial park as more important than someone's house that's on fire down on Amed Road," he said, alluding to one of several rural roads whose residents would receive the insurance break.

This week, the Durham Planning Commission deferred a vote on the proposed 2,733-square-foot facility, asking the department and residents to continue discussing alternatives.

One possibility: convincing one of the large corporations nearby to donate land for the station. Residents like that idea. Needham, a network analyst at UNC-Chapel Hill who has taken vacation time in the past to work on the fire station project, said finding land that way isn't as easy as it sounds.

Land in the Treyburn industrial area goes for $40,000 an acre, he said, which is far too much for his department to spend. And even if a corporation was willing to donate land, much of the untouched land in northeastern Durham is in the Falls Lake watershed and cannot be developed, he said.

"You ride by and look at it, and you think there's a lot of land out there," he said. "But people don't understand all the rules."

The sliver of land on Stagville Road was donated to the fire department by Terry Sanford Jr.

Residents also have argued that the Bahama substation makes little sense given the city's plan to build a new, fully staffed fire station on nearby Snow Hill Road in the next few years. The city already owns land and expects to have a new station up and running there by early 2009, Durham Fire Chief Bruce Pagan said this week.

That makes more sense to Allen Portnoy, who lives on Loblolly Drive in the Treyburn subdivision.

"We pay taxes to the City of Durham," Portnoy said during this week's Planning Commission meeting. "We do not pay taxes to Bahama."

During the commission's discussion of the issue earlier this week, two members said they have had positive experiences living in neighborhoods with fire stations nearby.

"It has probably enhanced property values rather than decreased property values," said Harry Dawley, one commission member.