ATTORNEY GENERAL Andrea Campbell is coming after Milton hard.

Officials in the badly divided town are struggling to figure out their next move with regard to the MBTA Communities Act, but Campbell isn’t giving them much time to think.

Thirteen days after Milton residents voted by a 54-46 percent margin to reject a zoning plan put forward by the Select Board and approved at Town Meeting, Campbell filed suit against the town, claiming it was not in compliance with the MBTA Communities Act. A day later she filed a motion to have the case moved directly to the Supreme Judicial Court. Legal briefs on the move to the SJC were due Monday and on the original complaint March 25.

Last Tuesday, Milton filed an emergency motion seeking a 14-day extension to file its responses. “Depriving the town of this brief additional window … would at a critical and sensitive juncture of these proceedings accrue to the town’s profound detriment and deny it a reasonable, full, and fair opportunity to defend itself from the attorney general office’s sweeping and unprecedented instant action,” the town’s motion said.

The very next day the attorney general’s office responded that a two-week extension was unacceptable and countered with a March 20 deadline for both briefs. “The town’s request for a two-week extension of each of its pending deadlines would make it nearly impossible for the case to be heard [before the SJC] in May and therefore would harm the public interest,” the attorney general’s office said.

On Thursday, the town indicated it hadn’t hired a lawyer to represent it yet and couldn’t do so until probably Monday night, when the Select Board met in executive session. The town pleaded for a delay, saying the “patently insufficient timeframe” would put the town at a disadvantage. “Accordingly, notwithstanding the attorney general office’s intransigent insistence upon it, its unduly accelerated proposed schedule is plagued to constrain the court, town, and other potentially interested parties to bear extraordinary and prejudicial burdens.”

The flowery language didn’t deter Supreme Judicial Court Justice Serge Georges Jr., who on Monday ordered the town to respond in writing today to the request to move the case to the SJC and prepare for a hearing on the matter Wednesday.

Milton seems unprepared, partly because of the fast-moving pace of legal action and mostly because town officials are as divided as the town they represent.

The MBTA Communities Act requires cities and towns to develop zones where multifamily housing development is allowed as a right. The zoning potential depends on the community’s proximity to MBTA service. The T’s Mattapan trolley runs from Ashmont Station in Dorchester at the end of the Red Line through Milton along the Neponset River to Mattapan Square in Boston.

The state designated Milton as a “rapid transit” community because of the trolley service, requiring the municipality to develop a zoning plan with the potential for more than 2,000 housing units. A plan that would have done that was rejected by Milton voters.

Many members of the Planning Board and Select Board think Milton should have been classified as an “adjacent community,” required to zone for less than 1,000 units. (Keep in mind a zoning plan doesn’t require that housing units get built, only that they could theoretically get built. Read an analysis by Luc Schuster of Boston Indicators for more on that.)

At a Planning Board meeting last week, a majority of the members seemed keen on developing new zoning plans for both a rapid transit and an adjacent community while pursuing reclassification, presumably in court. The Select Board hasn’t tipped its hand yet, but several members also seem to support a push for reclassification.

Campbell, of course, has shown no interest in giving Milton time to pursue reclassification. Indeed, she wants the Supreme Judicial Court to force Milton into compliance as fast as possible to send a message to other communities grappling with the MBTA Communities Act.

“The public interest strongly favors prompt resolution of the issues presented by this case, in view of the 129 cities and towns that are obligated to enact compliant zoning by December 31, 2024,” Campbell’s office said in a brief filed with the SJC last week. “Those cities and towns need this court’s guidance on the important issues that this case presents, and they need that guidance as soon as possible so that they have time to take the necessary steps to meet their own end-of-year deadlines.”