By Amy Pugsley Fraser and John Gillis

Local developers have been up in arms since Halifax regional council staged a hastily arranged meeting to request a 90-day development freeze from the provincial cabinet.

"The ramifications of that secret meeting still aren't fully understood," a private landowner in Halifax Regional Municipality said in an interview about council's Jan. 22 decision.

"Their actions might lead to the biggest economic fiasco that HRM has ever seen," said the man, who asked not to be identified.

He figures the freeze has affected his own projects by putting 30 people out of work for one year.

"And I'm just a small player," he said. "Most people who develop are."

He's seen the effects of the slowdown with work for associated businesses - like surveying companies, equipment sellers and road builders - drying up.

Since the moratorium was put in place, groups like the Nova Scotia Home Builders Association have paid for numerous newspaper advertisements that say the moratorium offers Halifax-area residents no choice in where to build a new home.

On Friday, the Urban Development Institute brought the media - and a petition with 500 names - right into Mayor Peter Kelly's office at city hall.

They, and other developers, showed up en masse to a public meeting in Hammonds Plains last week and plan to do the same tonight when the municipality hosts the first of three public information meetings on the moratorium.

"We've put out a bulletin and we've told the members that this is their opportunity to have their say," Paul Pettipas, CEO of the home builders association, said from his Fall River home Sunday night.

"We'll be there to speak on this, and on their rights as builders and developers."

Last week, the group moved their battle to Nova Scotia Supreme Court.

In a chambers application filed in the court office, a group that includes the Urban Development Institute and six developers demands that the order requested by regional council and granted by cabinet be quashed.

They say government officials acted without due process and used inaccurate numbers in formulating the plan.

Michael Wood, the lawyer representing the group, called the 90-day moratorium "draconian and unfair."

The court application claims council and minister Barry Barnet made errors of law and jurisdiction and acted unfairly in implementing the ban.

In an affidavit, institute president Darrell Dixon said that council, by making the decision at an unannounced closed-door meeting, didn't allow people whose lives and businesses are affected by the moratorium to have any say in the process.

Municipal officials have said the secrecy was necessary to avoid a rush on development permits, saying they learned a thing or two since the last time they implemented growth controls.

"In the 1990s, when they were out in Hammonds Plains talking about growth regulations or caps . . . we had this flood of development applications and this huge number of lots created in a very short period of time," Carol Macomber, Halifax's project manager of regional planning, said in a recent interview, placing the number at 3,000.

"So this time, we had to put an interim one in place so that didn't happen."