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HAMPTON -- They first started showing up at Hampton City Council meetings about 18 months ago, sporting green ribbons to trumpet their allegiance to park space near Buckroe Beach.

And if you've been to a meeting in Hampton since then, you've probably seen or heard from at least one of the Green Space Ladies - Sandra Canepa, Trish Ferraro or Cecile Trevathan - three women who came together to fight city development in their neighborhood. They hit the City Council campaign trail last spring, have been to nearly every meeting about the future of Fort Monroe and use massive group e-mails and a Web site to keep residents updated on even the smallest bits of progress inside City Hall.

"They've kept the light burning where in some places the light would have gone out in a heartbeat," said Hampton Mayor Ross A. Kearney II.

This was not their first populist campaign, or the first time they faced criticism.

The Green Space Ladies gained notoriety in early 2005, when they moved to save park space by circulating a petition - one they say has gathered more than 12,000 signatures.

City Council eventually put Buckroe plans on hold, saying they wanted any concept to blend with future development on Fort Monroe.

Now the council is preparing to reset the course for Buckroe next month, and the Green Space Ladies are continuing their vigil.

Council members are expected to pick one of a handful of designs for the grassy blocks near the beach and developers and homeowners in the area are waiting to see what direction the city will take.

Park redevelopment is supposed to set the pace for revitalization throughout the community, which is trying to shake a reputation for crime and blight.

All of the options keep the two beachfront lots as open park space, leaving locals and planners to fight over what belongs on the next set of blocks - houses and condominiums or more parkland and shops.

When the city offered the options this fall, the ladies activated again by printing up hundreds of fliers, distributing them to businesses throughout the city and setting up a P.O. Box to gather the comments.

Worried that city officials would question their numbers, Canepa hired a notary public to certify the results, which have overwhelmingly favored keeping the lots open and public. In Canepa's eyes, her archrival has been the city's planning department. "We've been fighting them since day one," Canepa said.

City Manager Jesse Wallace said those critiques are unfair especially because the city set up extra public hearings about Buckroe, and City Council members will listen to citizens twice before voting next month.

"We have done everything that we could reasonably do to ensure that public comment has been heard," he said.

Not everyone is thrilled with the gumption and stamina of the Green Space Ladies, especially some of the leaders of the Buckroe Civic Association.

The homeowners' organization helped craft the initial plans for Buckroe - ones that included more residential and retail development on the open lots.

Many local residents and business owners have waited for Hampton to reinvest in Buckroe for more than a decade and some feel that the Green Space Ladies have delayed the neighborhood's turnaround.

During Tuesday's Planning Commission meeting, a former civic association president thanked city officials for listening to the studies and reading the numbers. "I'm in support of professional planners and not personal opinion," Amy Hobbs said. "I think that is where we lost track and lost our way."

On Tuesday, one planning commissioner questioned whether the masses are against redevelopment there. But Ferraro, one of the Green Space Ladies, has no doubts about who wants to keep the park space public.

"All the people in the bowling alley and all the people in the 7-Elevens who come up and thank us for what we're doing," Ferraro said in an interview. "I wouldn't be wasting my time if I didn't believe that people wanted to keep that space open."