When 300 persons from towns totaling less than 5,000 residents attend a hearing, that's a tip off that locals smell something that could change their communities. For perspective, a comparable turnout for a city of Kingston hearing would require 1,200 residents.

The Durst Organization, better known for its work in New York City real estate, and Landmark Land Co. are shopping a plan for weekend and second homes on the former Carvel estate. It is before the Pine Plains Planning Board for environmental review.

A spokesman for the engineering firm working on the project said the Durst plan would build on the vision of former owner Tom Carvel, the ice cream magnate who died in 1990.

With apologies to the memory of Carvel and to his ice cream pal, Fudgie the Whale, that's a dicey proposition, at best. Carvel indubitably knew a thing or two about retailing ice cream and franchising. But he was, charitably, a bit eccentric and, to borrow a memorable line by humorist Dave Barry, we mean "a bit eccentric" in the same way that you might consider the surface of the sun "a bit warm."

It's entirely appropriate for residents to be concerned about a development of such substantial scale.

Even if you lowball the occupancy projection to a scant two persons per house, the project would add a potential 2,000 residents, a 40 percent increase. Up it slightly to three residents per household and, suddenly, you've got nearly 3,000 more residents and an increase of 60 percent.

Add to that the spread of housing across rural lands and that the owners of the houses would be imports to the community with rather different backgrounds and values.

Of course, there's environmental impact and, then, there's environmental impact. And the environmental impact that most everyone has their eye on in these matters are not the ones they end up arguing about, such as water runoff, septic disposal, erosion, traffic and the like. To some extent, all of those things can be engineered away.

What you can't engineer away - never mind accurately project - are the socioeconomic and lifestyle impacts of spreading houses across 2,000 acres of open land and boosting a rural community's population by 40 to 60 percent with outsiders.

That said, Pine Plains and much of the rest of the Mid-Hudson Valley are facing an inexorable march of people and money upon their little slice of heaven. With those new people can also come new prosperity and ideas.

Whether spreading 1,000 homes over 2,000 rural acres is the right way to do it is an open question and deserves full ventilation under the current environmental review.

Finally, communities have a right to guide their futures through prudent land-use plans and zoning. Pine Plains, the last community in Dutchess County without zoning, has been late to avail itself of those tools and has been taking an agonizingly long time to develop its first zoning ordinance.

It's now in the hands of the Town Board and past time to get that done.