In one of its most important votes of the year, a divided City Council will vote tonight on the hotly-debated Citywide Rezoning Petition, determining the course of housing and development in the city for the foreseeable future.

The council, due to consider the city's Planning Board reccomendation--a proposal three years in the making--tonight, will instead choose between the original plan and a last-minute alternative proposed by Councillors Kathleen L. Born and David P. Maher.

On Friday, Born and Maher submitted, as expected, a revised rezoning plan to the council, which will remove large sections of East Cambridge and an area near Alewife from the petition.

The petition aims to produce more affordable housing, restrict new development and reduce traffic in the city by reforming specific zoning guidelines for Cambridge's neighborhoods.

Born said decisions on East Cambridge should be deferred until the East Cambridge Planning Study, a $500,000 replanning process approved by the council in Jan. 2000, produces its report.

Born said that she thinks the revised plan will have enough support to carry the required majority of seven out of the nine councillors.

"I think the original proposal taken as a whole didn't have the support. But I think this does," Born said.

Members of the East Cambridge Planning Study and at least one councillor, however, are against the Born-Maher proposal.

Carole K. Bellew, a committee member of the East Cambridge Planning Study, said that the study of the neighborhood, which has the largest amount of land available for development, was not intended to interfere with the rezoning plan.

"East Cambridge suffers the most because we have the most open space to be built on," Bellew said.. "We never, ever anticipated being given on a plate the rezoning of East Cambridge."

She added that in leaving rezoning to the Planning Study, the City Council would be postponing indefinitely the rezoning of that area.

"If you've noticed how much work people have to to in order to get anything done...the problem is that to get seven votes in any petition is almost impossible," Bellew said.

The result, she said, may be that East Cambridge will not get any rezoning.

"We may end up with nothing, if you look at it realistically," Bellew said.

East Cambridge is currently governed by the Larkin Petition, an 18-month moratorium on development in the neighborhood that was approved by the council in Jan. 2000.

Bellew said she wants the council to refile the entire plan--which it would automatically do if it does not vote on it before midnight tonight--and wait to include her team's reccomendations instead of passing a citywide rezoning plan which does not include East Cambridge.

And Councillor Henrietta Davis, who is a strong supporter of the original plan, said she is confident that the Born-Maher proposal will not be passed tonight.

"I'm in favor of returning to the original plan--it was developed with three years of thought and public process," said Davis. "From what I hear it doesn't look good."

Both Harvard and MIT sent letters of opposition to the original plan, individually and jointly.

"The proposal is being opposed by the universities, by the unions, and by most major landowners," Born said.

But Mary Power, Harvard's senior director of community relations, said she had not seen the new proposal yet and was unable to comment on it.

"A Harvard representative will attend the City Council meeting on Monday," she said yesterday.

Tonight's vote could bring to an end a process which began on Sept. 12, 1997, when the council gave its go-ahead for a rezoning plan to be developed by the Planning Board.

But though the board was supposed to take 18 months to create its proposal, it took three years, as the Planning Board only submitted its petition Sept. 5.

--Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.