Theyíve done it again. The Buncombe County Board of Commissioners has once again sold out the interests of taxpayers to give developers a handout at the expense of the local environment and green space.

In November of last year, the commissioners approved the sale of a building and parcel of green space in front of City Hall to developer Stewart Coleman for slightly more than half the propertyís assessed tax value. Discussion of the sale took all of two minutes.

The parcel of land might be recognizable to anyone who attended Shindig on the Green prior to the past two years. It is the site where a beautiful, large magnolia tree stands and where musicians who come to the annual old-time music series have typically gathered to play music together.

The past two years, of course, Shindig has been held at Martin Luther King Jr. Park while renovations to Pack Square have been underway. No doubt many music lovers have looked forward to returning to Pack Square upon its completion to once again jam together under the old magnolia.

What they will find, instead, is a 10-story condo building.

So far, no one has been more disturbed by this than the Pack Square Conservancy, the nonprofit charged with overseeing renovations of the park. At the urging of numerous donors and citizens, the conservancyís board last week directed its attorneys to investigate whether any laws were broken.

Of course, the nonprofit is limited in how strong a stance it can take. After all, Buncombe County, to its credit, has donated $2 million to the project. ìDonít bite the hand that feeds you,î as they say.

Perhaps that would be good advice for the commissioners to heed. After all, they just undercut the taxpayers by selling a valuable piece of public space for half its value.

Worse, the Buncombe tax office on July 6 decided to suddenly reduce the value of the property in half ó more than seven months after the sale and exactly one day before the story of the sale broke in the Asheville Citizen-Times.

Terms like ìcronyismî and ìinsider dealsî certainly come to mind.

This is the same kind of shady, underhanded dealing the board engaged in when it agreed to lease the countyís former landfill site in Woodfin to Progress Energy to build a diesel-burning power plant for just one dollar per year.

In that case, amid massive public outcry, the plan was rejected by a Woodfin board. In this case, the public needs to seek out similar recourse.

We feel that some form of reckoning is in order. With so little green space in downtown Asheville, it is unconscionable that the county would sell any of it to a condo developer without any real debate, and at a rate that undercuts the value of the land.

Public space is a crucial aspect of a cityís quality of life. There wouldnít be so many people wanting to move here if Asheville did not have the lively public life that it does. All the high-rise condos we try to stack on these mountains will not change that.