FILE - A sticker saying "Keep Sapelo Geechee" is worn on the shirt of George Grovner, a resident of the Hogg Hummock community on Sapelo Island, during a meeting of McIntosh County commissioners, Sept. 12, 2023, in Darien, Ga. (AP Photo/Ross Bynum, File)

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Georgia's highest court waded Wednesday into a fight between Black landowners and local officials who have weakened long-standing protections for one of the South's last Gullah-Geechee communities founded by freed slaves.

Residents of largely unspoiled Sapelo Island have been trying to roll back zoning changes imposed by McIntosh County officials that doubled the size of homes allowed in a tiny enclave called Hogg Hummock. Homeowners fear the change will bring unaffordable tax increases, threatening one of America's most historically and culturally unique Black communities.

The Georgia Supreme Court heard legal arguments Wednesday on whether residents can attempt to repeal the 2023 zoning amendments by forcing a special election.

Hogg Hummock residents and their supporters last year gathered more than 2,300 petition signatures from registered voters seeking a referendum in the coastal county 60 miles (96 kilometers) south of Savannah.

McIntosh County commissioners sued to stop the referendum. A lower court judge canceled voting less than a week before the election, ruling it was illegal after hundreds had already cast ballots early.

Philip Thompson, an attorney for the Hogg Hummock residents, urged the state Supreme Court to declare that they have a “constitutional right to a referendum” on the zoning changes so that they can defend a place that's "a cultural and historical treasure.”

McIntosh County's attorney, Ken Jarrard, argued that zoning powers “are absolutely different” from others granted to county governments by Georgia's constitution, and therefore aren't subject to being challenged by referendum.

Roughly 30 to 50 Black residents live in Hogg Hummock, also known as Hog Hammock, a community of dirt roads and modest homes founded by their enslaved ancestors who worked the cotton plantation of Thomas Spalding.

It's among a dwindling number of small communities started by emancipated island slaves — known collectively as Gullah, or Geechee in Georgia — scattered along the coast from North Carolina to Florida. Scholars say their separation from the mainland caused these communities to retain much of their African heritage, from their unique dialect to skills and crafts such as cast-net fishing and weaving baskets.

Hogg Hummock earned a place in 1996 on the National Register of Historic Places, the official list of treasured U.S. historic sites. But for protections to preserve the community, residents depend on the local government in McIntosh County, where 65% of the 11,100 residents are white.

Hogg Hummock landowners said they were blindsided in the fall of 2023 when county commissioners voted to relax zoning restrictions enacted decades earlier to help shield the community's Black residents from pressure to sell land held by their families for generations.

Attorneys for McIntosh County say the residents' concerns are overblown, arguing in one court filing that allowing larger homes in their community is so “unremarkable” that it “borders on banal.”

The issues before the Georgia Supreme Court have nothing to do with whether Hogg Hummock deserves special protections. Instead, the justices are being asked to deal with technicalities over whether local zoning laws can be challenged by referendum and whether McIntosh County commissioners had a right to sue to stop the October vote.

The case follows a 2023 ruling by the Georgia justices that upheld a referendum that blocked coastal Camden County from building a launchpad for commercial rockets. The court ruled that a rarely used provision of Georgia's constitution empowers citizens to veto county government decisions at the ballot box.

That decision emboldened Hogg Hummock residents to pursue their own referendum to overturn McIntosh County's zoning changes.

But attorneys for the county commissioners have argued the constitutional provision allowing citizen referendums doesn't apply to local zoning decisions, because zoning powers are addressed in a separate section of the state constitution. They also say the trial court judge was wrong to put the zoning changes on hold pending a ruling by state Supreme Court, which could take six months.

Lawyers for the Hogg Hummock residents say the referendum shouldn't have been interrupted and that county commissioners had no legal standing to sue to stop it, citing the high court's ruling in the spaceport case.

The Supreme Court is weighing the Sapelo Island case as residents recover from an unrelated tragedy.

Hundreds of tourists were visiting the island on Oct. 19 when a walkway collapsed at the state-operated ferry dock, killing seven people. It happened as Hogg Hummock was celebrating its annual Cultural Day festival, a day intended to be a joyful respite from worries about the community’s uncertain future.

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