Eschewing the phone trees of the past, homeowners intent on stopping some local development have harnessed Internet technology to rouse support and fine-tune an opposition strategy that's no longer as simple as petitioning and pleading until elected officials vote your way.

The old line "Not in my back yard" has become more subtle: "Not this, and not now."

The tools of choice are online forums, Yahoo! e-mail loops and PowerPoint. The message isn't anti-growth but against a county zoning system that can allow new development without fully weighing consequences, such as mounting neighborhood floods and traffic jams.

Behind their increasingly tech-based opposition, homeowners say, is a simple fear of how the County Council will vote and a belief that local developers have long been far more organized.

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"We're helpless," said Becky Willett, a nurse who is leading an opposition effort in the Golden Strip. "We never know where (council members) stand with citizens versus developers. You just never know."

The trend was on full display last week as Willett led a group opposed to a residential development off Scuffletown Road with a presentation that included scenic photographs of the rural neighborhood, a point-by-point rebuttal of a developer's plan and detailed school population numbers.

Far from vilifying developers, though, she and her neighbors took pains to say they're not opposed to development in the vacant field on a hilltop -- just not this proposal of 138 homes on 48 acres.

That's a more sophisticated argument Willett believes needs to be spread to other neighborhood groups who lose zoning disputes perhaps because they haven't done their homework.

"All they can do is get up and say, 'We don't want the traffic,'" she said. "Council members hear that as 'Nah, nah, nah.' They don't even hear it, because that's what everybody says."

Down the road, another neighborhood is fighting another zoning case but sharing ammunition with Willett's coalition via a Yahoo! "e-loop" that homeowners association president Paula DiDonato said is changing the way citizens push back.

"It helps you realize that there's a silent majority out there and that there are so many people who value the quality of life," DiDonato said. "That's not what's happening up at County Council."

Council members and candidates for office have taken notice.

Council Chairman Butch Kirven told colleagues in a recent public meeting that if council members keep veering from a nonbinding land use plan the council has previously passed, it could cause credibility problems among voters.

DiDonato has used e-mail to increase the pressure, sending the results of a letter-writing campaign to council members electronically instead of delivering 12 envelopes.

She gets quicker notices of upcoming meetings online and stays connected with Willett's group via the members-only e-loop, where communication is instantaneous but requires constant maintenance.

"You've got to check e-mail every couple hours," Willett said.

Willett's daughter helped her with PowerPoint slides. When she needed figures showing already crowded local schools, she asked the members of the e-mail group, called Finer Carolina.

She got the numbers within hours.

Few are experts at this stuff, but the collective efforts of engineers, lawyers and retired civic servants have increasingly overshadowed the professional pitches of local developers at recent public hearings.

They use the county's mapping Web site to plot slopes and rivers in flood-prone areas. They download and scrutinize biographic information for applicants to the council-appointed Planning Commission.

"Most are related to development in one way or another, ex-real estate, architecture, etc.," Willett wrote her neighbors recently. "Several potential members stated they had NEVER been to a Zoning Board meeting."

The Greenville News has reported that seven members of the nine-member panel are in development-related businesses, and Willett included a link to one of the articles.

Six of the nine new applicants are in real estate, architecture or engineering -- the kind of revelation that makes residents nervous enough to organize with the intent of influencing all of the council, not just their own representative.

"The other members of council have no obligation to us," said Michael Wimpy, a dentist who lives in the Adam's Run neighborhood now collaborating with Willett's group.

Finer Carolina not only includes like-minded residents in Wimpy's neighborhood, but has also shared its strategy with communities as far away as Georgetown, Willett said.

The key, she says: Don't object to development. Object to improper development.

Russell Harter has developed this approach on the Eastside, where a recent PowerPoint presentation to the council included traffic photos and other neighborhood data designed to show specifically why a proposed drugstore would be bad for traffic.

Ray Henderson used the strategy on Woodruff Road, arguing that certain kinds of development would be inappropriate next to a longtime local cemetery.

DiDonato, who lives on a pond at the bottom of a watershed, says the argument is important in areas where growth has yet to cause the kinds of headaches associated with Woodruff.

The potential for flooding in and around her pond is a motivating factor for Adam's Run, and DiDonato said homeowners successfully convinced one developer to pull his rezoning application by showing him the area's topography and what kinds of water control they would expect.

"There will be development," she said. "But what we're asking is to continue to keep the quality of life high, and to be careful."

Her neighbors already feel burned by a nearby tennis club that she said got a rezoning but didn't shape up the way they were told. Now, they feel additional demands in zoning cases aren't unreasonable.

"Most of us have lived in a lot of different places, and we've seen the way it can be done well," DiDonato said.

Behind many of the citizen groups is a high-energy organizer with a personal story.

For the Woodruff group, it was Henderson, whose husband is buried in the cemetery next to a proposed shopping center site.

For Willett, it's the memory of her father, a hotel owner in the Northeast who always wanted to return to green and peaceful Greenville. The first time a developer proposed a project on the Scuffletown property, her father had returned to the area but was dying in bed and couldn't speak.

Willett sang the famous lyrics to "Carolina in the Morning" at his bedside, and somehow, she says, he sang along. Soon after, she named her opposition group Finer Carolina.

The current zoning case gets its next hearing Wednesday at the Planning Commission's 4 p.m. meeting, and for all the benefits of high-tech opposition, there's no substitute yet for citizens' physical presence before council members.

Willett and some friends plan to go, even though they cannot speak publicly.

DiDonato's group has similarly attended county meetings where they can't make verbal statements, even standing up during one of the council's committee meetings "just so they knew we were watching."