The plan and its presentation drew favorable response from taskforce members and other attenders at the Dec. 21 meeting after Tony Felicia, vice president of corporate and community affairs, pledged continued cooperation with community interests. Going back to 1955, when the former Atlas Powder Co., an Astra Zeneca predecessor, moved its headquarters from rented space in the Delaware Trust building in downtown Wilmington to company-owned land along Concord Pike opposite Fairfax, "we have tried very hard to be a good neighbor in this community [and] we have no less a desire now that we are Astra Zeneca," he said.

Astra Zeneca, which claims international market leadership in several categories of prescription drugs, would dwarf Atlas, the smaller of two explosives companies – Hercules Powder Co., now Hercules Inc., was the other – spun off from Du Pont Co. by a 1912 antitrust decree. As a result of the merger this year of Astra and Zeneca, "little Delaware has one of the top five [pharmaceutical] companies headquartered here," Felicia said.

At the taskforce meeting, DelDOT presented a new proposal for keeping the intersection of Concord Pike and Augustine Cut-off partly open. Although there was only limited discussion, it seemed to satisfy objections of some Wilmington residents who have maintained that closure of the intersection would inundate Broom Street and other city streets with rush-hour traffic.

In sharp contrast to recent contentious meetings as the taskforce struggled to forge a consensus on highway and park plans in the Blue Ball area, the session turned out to be almost a pre-holiday lovefest. The biggest dispute was over the design of a questionnaire DelDOT officials asked taskforce members to complete to get an idea of their views on the various options that have been presented. The questionnaire was withdrawn in the face of several objections.

There also was a dispute over the scheduling of meetings of the taskforce’s highway and park committees for Dec. 29. It was said that many members and the interested public would not be able to attend because of other commitments during the Christmas-New Year’s holiday season. The taskforce is working under a self-imposed deadline to agree – more or less – to a preliminary plan on Jan. 5, present it at a Jan. 10 legislators’ ‘town meeting’ and have the group’s policy and executive committees officially approve it on Jan. 12.

State Representative Catherine Cloutier said the tight schedule has created an impression that officials of the Delaware Office of Economic Development, DelDOT and the Department of Parks & Recreation already have decided on a plan and are just going through the motions of public participation. Gail VanGilder, of Delaware Greenways, said that meeting during the holidays blocks "meaningful input" by the public.

Earlier in the session, Darrell Minott, director of the development office, said that "everything is working out quite well" in fulfilling the state’s commitment to provide Astra Zeneca with land and infrastructure to support an additional 1.6 million square feet of work space.

The company’s plan – which Felicia said is not "cast in stone" or meant to be a working blueprint – calls for a chain of connected buildings, or wings of a single building, snaking down the center of the hill from Powder Mill Road opposite the company’s present site to where a proposed new Delaware Route 141 would approach an interchange with Concord Pike at Foulk Road. The buildings would be a maximum of five stories above ground and compatible in design to those on the existing property.

Astra Zeneca has hired an architect – with the unlikely name of CHU2A, of Princeton, N.J. – and a construction management firm – Gilbane, of Philadelphia. It hopes to get through an expedited New Castle County land use approval process by March and to break ground in June. Construction and occupancy will be in phases.

Because various considerations have reduced the amount of developable land on the triangular tract the state will give it from the originally designated 86 acres to 39 acres, not all the desired expansion can take place there, Felicia said. It is now intended to construct 1.3 million square feet of office space and to provide an additional 300,000 square feet of laboratory space on the existing northern tract. Eventually, the southern tract will contain the London-based pharmaceuticals company’s North American headquarters and the northern one its research center on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

"As hard as we tried, we couldn’t get 1.6 million square feet on … the ‘amazing shrinking site’," Manula said.

That total, Felicia said, was "essential" to the merged company’s decision to locate in Delaware rather than at Astra’s Chesterbook, Pa., site. State officials led by Governor Thomas Carper put together the incentive package last January to take advantage of what Minott called "an opportunity to attract a new, large corporate citizen."

But, Felicia added, the company desires a single, rather than a divided, ‘campus’ to promote unity and interaction among employees. That brought up the still unresolved issue of whether Powder Mill Road, now part of Route 141, should be abandoned as a public road through the site. The taskforce in an earlier meeting voted, by an informal show of hands, not to close it.

The Astra Zeneca plan offers three scenarios for dealing with the issue. Although the taskforce meeting agenda included addressing it, the topic was not brought up outside the company’s presentation.

"Our plan can accommodate a decision to keep Route 141 ‘as is’ or a decision to vacate the existing roadway," Felecia said.

One possibility would have buildings coming close to the existing road and constructing a bridge over it for both vehicles and pedestrians over. A more elaborate scheme – roughly similar to the one employed on Interstate 95 alongside Penns Landing in Philadelphia – would take Powder Mill Road through a wide tunnel under a new structure, which would be a link in the chain between the company’s existing main building and the new ones on the southern tract. Closing Powder Mill Road would allow construction of a conventional a building for the chain.

Felicia said the plan seeks to "minimize impact on natural resources." The company, he said, will not disturb most of the woods and wetland bordering Concord Pike. That will provide a buffer "and give our people and the community something nice to look at," he added. Restricting building height will keep their roofs below the top of the tree line.

Building them higher would introduce the necessity for elevator travel which would discourage personal interaction among people in the various offices, he said. The company will provide parking in both adjoining structures and on two belowground levels under the new buildings. There will be no parking lots on the tract. Parking space is not included in the 1.3 million square foot buildout.

Manula said there is not enough room on the southern tract to provide for collecting stormwater run-off. It was revealed at the previous taskforce meeting that the state has committed to taking care of that in the section of proposed parkland south of Riceland Road.

Felicia said Astra Zeneca already provides several personal services "to keep our people on site" and thereby reduce the amount of traffic generated during midday. Included are two restaurants, a bank, barber and gift shops, and a fitness center. The structure above a Powder Mill Road tunnel, if that option is chosen, would most likely be an "amenities building," he said.

Under DelDOT’s latest proposal, the Concord Pike-Augustine Cut-off intersection would be open to the extent of allowing right turns from the Cut-off onto southbound Concord Pike to access I-95 and Concord Avenue and left turns from northbound Concord Pike onto the Cut-off. A traffic signal would be kept there with Concord Pike through traffic having considerably longer greens than the side road during each cycle. Traffic intending to go northbound on Concord Pike or Foulk Road or to access the Cut-off from those roads would use a new ‘local road’ layout parallel to the pike.

In presenting the plan, DelDOT highway engineer Barry Schock said it meets standards for allowing Concord Pike traffic to flow without unacceptable congestion during rush hour and would prevent any significant traffic buildup on the city streets. Buildup could be almost totally eliminated by prohibiting left turns from the foot of the Augustine Cut-off hill onto 18th Street during rush hours, he said.

"The downside is that we would still have a [traffic] signal on Concord Pike," Schock said. The existing signal is believed to be the cause of many, if not most, of the rear-end collisions at or near the intersection. DelDOT counted 165 accidents there during the most recent three years, of which 114 involved rear-end or chain collisions.

Neither he nor DelDOT official Joe Wautka, chairman of the transportation committee, would say if the possible new arrangement would reduce the number of accidents. "We are changing it in terms of the amount of time [motorists on Concord Pike] will have to wait [for a green light], but that is still an issue," Wautka said. The advantage of not having a signal, he said, lies in reducing "the number of decisions" a driver has to make. That, in turn, supposedly increases the amount of concentration on driving.

State Senator Harris McDowell said presence of a signal is far less hazardous than the speeds traffic would attain absent a signal. Another meeting attender noted that DelDOT apparently is opposed to keeping a signal at Augustine Cut-off but not to retaining the one at the entrance of Independence Mall, about equidistant on the north side of the proposed Foulk Road interchange.