WHEATFIELD — Church at Shawnee Landing is planning to buy a closed Catholic church in North Tonawanda, after abandoning a plan to build a church on land it owns off Shawnee Road.

Church moderator Vic Baker said last week that the church also is threatening to sue the Town of Wheatfield if it rezones the church’s property without its consent.

Baker said the Shawnee Landing congregation has been talking to the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo about the former St. Joseph Church on Payne Avenue in North Tonawanda.

“We’re in a process where we’re almost at an understanding,” Baker said.

“We are in negotiations right now for the sale of the property,” confirmed Kevin Keenan, spokesman for the diocese.

He said St. Joseph closed June 22, 2008, and the parish was merged with Our Lady of Czestochowa. There are several buildings on the idle property, and Keenan said the diocese’s practice in dealing with closed churches is not to sell buildings piecemeal.

Church at Shawnee Landing formerly was known as Payne Avenue Christian Church, but sold its building and changed its name when it floated plans four years ago for a 19- acre campus in Wheatfield.

Besides a church and a day care center, the plan included low-income housing. That was a key component in producing public opposition to the plan, fanned by some town politicians.

In the end, the church spent $500,000 to construct an access road and infrastructure, now all owned by the town. In partnership with investor Paul Granville and Belmont Shelter Corp., 64 housing units were opened in 2007. They are fully rented.

However, the town Planning Board ruled in early November that revisions to the church plan required that the site plan review process would have to start over from scratch. The congregation dropped plans to conduct the attached day

care center, and there were disputes over drainage and green space.

The congregation reacted by announcing that it would not be building its new church in Wheatfield.

The Planning Board’s next move was to recommend a rezoning of the roughly 11.5 acres Shawnee Landing had left after the housing complex was built.

Baker said it was zoned R-3, for multiple dwellings, since 2004.

Richard Muscatello, the Planning Board chairman, said it ought to be rezoned to R-2, which allows only one-or two-family homes. The result would be that any further multiple dwellings, such as those already built as “The Town Homes at Shawnee Landing,” would be illegal.

Baker called it “a malicious and vindictive effort to punish the church, for what reason I don’t know.”

Muscatello said the only reason the property was changed from R-2 to R-3 in the first place was because of the church’s original proposal.

He said, “Since they’re not going to build their project, we should put it back the way it was, because that’s how it is in our master plan. If that’s being malicious, I’ll let someone else decide that.”

Baker calls it illegal. He said an agreement that he and Town Attorney Robert J. O’Toole signed in 2007 settling a lawsuit over the town’s closure of the access road contains a promise by the town not to alter the zoning of the congregation’s property.

“There is absolutely no ambiguity in that clause. I wrote it in anticipation of just such a future stunt by the town,” Baker wrote in a letter to O’Toole last week.

O’Toole could not be reached to comment last week.

A public hearing on the rezoning proposal is set for the Jan. 25 Town Board meeting.