NORTH SMITHFIELD — The would-be developer of Rankin Estates is suing the town, accusing its land-use boards of using “illegal, secretive and egregious conduct” to deny the 122-lot subdivision a fair hearing.

The town’s lawyer in the case, Robert V. Rossi, said the charges by Narragansett Improvement Co., of Providence, are an “outrageous” effort to shift blame for a poorly prepared development plan.

“To say I am outraged over this is an understatement,” Rossi said. “The whole thing is self-serving,” he added, contending that the Rankin Estates plan was submitted “with utter disregard for the regulations.”

For nearly eight years, Narragansett Improvement has been trying to win approval for the subdivision it wants to build on about 260 acres in the southwestern corner of town. The project has been the subject of multiple lawsuits contesting various parts of the process during that time.

Last month, the company filed an Open Meetings Law complaint about events leading up to a Planning Board meeting on Aug. 2, 2007, at which it heard testimony on the project, specifically from Frederick F. Meli, an anthropologist the town had hired to conduct a survey of stone piles on and near Narragansett Improvement’s property.

In 2007 Meli had said he was “95 percent certain” the piles were Native American burial mounds, possibly centuries old. But in an affidavit he gave to Narragansett Improvement’s lawyers about a month ago, he said he couldn’t draw any conclusions about the piles.

In an April 16, 2007 report to the town, Meli said he found projectile points and an ax head that could be more than 1,000 years old. He said he found stones there that were not natural to northern Rhode Island and that the piles were consistent with Native American burial practices.

“Within the limited scope of this investigation, there has been sufficient archaeological, anthropological and historical evidence identified to designate the area within the measured grid as a historical cemetery,” Meli wrote in a June 25, 2007 report.

According to a transcript of his testimony before the Planning Board on Aug. 2, 2007, Meli told the board “I would have to say that, by what we have discovered so far, they are definitely Native American and they are definitely burials.”

But in an affidavit dated Oct. 27 of this year, Meli told Narragansett Improvement’s lawyers that after bones he’d found at another nearby site were determined to be from a pig and not a centuries-dead human being, he reassessed his previous findings. Instead of being “95 percent certain” the site were burial mounds, as he was in 2007, Meli said his site walks were “not sufficient to draw any conclusion as to whether there are Native American burial grounds or historic cemeteries on the Rankin Estates property.”

Meli could not be reached for comment

Narragansett Improvement contends in its suit, and in an open-meetings complaint filed with the attorney general’s office, that Meli met two days before the Planning Board’s Aug. 2, 2007 hearing in lawyer Rossi’s office with Planning Board members Joseph Cardello III and Bruce Santa Anna, then-Town Planner Michael Phillips, then-Conservation Commission member Donald Gagnon and Rossi. Meli and civil engineer L. Robert Smith said they went over their anticipated testimony with the group. Meli called it a rehearsal.

Rossi said a meeting before the formal Planning Board session did take place, but he said it was an information session for some of the board members, so they would be sufficiently informed to consider the long-running and complicated case, not to set up a sham hearing.

Michael A. Kelly, Narragansett Improvement’s lawyer, alleged that the pre-meeting session was a dress rehearsal for an intended rejection of his client’s plan.

Participants at the meeting in Rossi’s office said they have been advised by counsel not to comment because of the litigation.

Even though the session didn’t have a quorum of the five-member board, Kelly said it still violated the Open Meetings Law because it was designed to get around the quorum requirement.

“It was intended to influence the outcome of the meeting,” Kelly said, disputing Rossi’s informational claim.

“Then, why was it secret,” Kelly said. “Why was it in Rossi’s office.”

Rossi said Meli’s points were not crucial to the board’s decision to reject the plan. Besides the mounds, the board found the project would result in an excessive amount of gravel removal that would spoil the natural character of the area and that road designations on the map were contradictory.

He said Kelly’s claims were “absurd.”

“That would be for a court to look at and rule on the actions,” Rossi said. “ … Let a judge say it.”

jhill@projo.com