Although the Planning Board has yet to make its required recommendation – it has scheduled a public hearing on the plan for June 6 and will hold its decision-rendering business meeting on June 22 – Councilman Robert Weiner made that unqualified announcement at a Brandywine Hundred legislators’ ‘town meeting’ on May 25.

"They [the company] will be able to have a groundbreaking in mid-July," Weiner said.

Starting the first phase of the project in time to take advantage of this year’s prime construction season, looking to completion in 2002, has long been a stated goal of the company.

Council must approve changes proposed by the company to deed restrictions on the property along Concord Pike between Powder Mill and Foulk Roads, including elimination of a prohibition against a helicopter landing pad, and agree that the development plan is in accord with the technical requirements of the development code.

It was apparent from the tenor of the presentations that providing the public facilities to support Astra Zeneca’s expansion will most likely follow the normal course of community consultation rather than be handled by a renewal of last year’s Blue Ball Project Taskforce process which resulted in conceptual plans.

Joseph Wutka, DelDOT’s lead representative on the project, said, for instance, that the agency will show a scale model of the proposed road network for the first time at a meeting of the Council of Civic Organizations of Brandywine Hundred on June 8. That will be in Brandywine High School, beginning at 7 p.m. He also spoke of a public workshop in July and a public hearing in autumn.

Michelle Reardon, spokeswoman for the state Office of Economic Development, which convened the taskforce, said officials of the three lead agencies plan to get together soon to determine its fate.

There had been a get-back-together meeting scheduled for early April, but that was postponed – perhaps cancelled – reportedly to accommodate Secretary of Transportation Anne Canby and other DelDOT officials who were heavily involved at the time with the reconstruction closure of Interstate 95.

"It looks like you have pretty specific plans. Do we still have an opportunity to make changes?" civic activist Gail VanGilder asked at the community meeting. Wutka replied that workshops and hearings are avenues for "obtaining community input" without being specific about the extent to which the public will be able to influence the course of future planning.

Also at the meeting:

· Delaware Department of Transportation revealed its schedule for building the network of roads in the Blue Ball area to serve the expanded complex. Completion is scheduled for 2007.

· The state Division of Parks & Recreation unveiled a basic design plan for the proposed Blue Ball park area which includes active recreation, historic preservation and stormwater management.

· A DelDOT official said that study to "define the need" for an expanded Tyler McConnell Bridge will commence this summer and, she said, be followed by a bridge design competition next year and building between 2003 and 2005.

After several months of supposed uncertainty, the Astra Zeneca project has been highballing along a fast track since approval by the General Assembly of a nonbinding resolution committing DelDOT to adhering to its construction timetable and assuring that capital funds will be made available for it to do so.

With that, the company on May 11 signed a transportation management agreement providing for several steps to reduce company-generated rush hour traffic. On the same day, the county Department of Land Use, citing the Assembly resolution and the transportation management agreement, issued a recommendation that Astra Zeneca be relieved from having to comply with the code's level-of-service requirements. Level-of-service has to do with the amount of traffic congestion at intersections impacted by the development proposal. County Council unanimously approved that waiver on May 23.

Concurrent with the legislators’ meeting on May 25, the county Board of Adjustment approved code variations permitting Astra Zenca to build pedestrian and vehicular bridges over Powder Mill Road and to situate buildings closer to the highway that the development code allows.

"We are very appreciative of the level-of-service waiver we were granted on Tuesday of this week," said Tony Felicia, Astra Zeneca’s vice president of corporate and community affairs, whom Weiner invited to stand at his side while making his announcement about Council’s remaining timetable.

Felicia added that the company is strongly dedicated to making good on its promise to reduce commuter traffic to its expanded headquarters and laboratories. "We have made a commitment that ‘traffic mitigation’ will be more than a buzz word," he said.

Weiner said agreements by that company and its neighbor down Powder Mill Road, the Du Pont Co. Experimental Station, to have at least 15% of their workforces arrive in other than single-occupant vehicles by the time their respective expansions are completed is unprecedented.

Felicia said Astra Zenca already is increasing the number of people riding its every-hour shuttle buses between its Brandywine Hundred headquarters and the offices of the Astra side of the business in Wayne, Pa., in the Philadelphia Main Line suburbs. That travel, now for business purposes, will be expanded to provide links at the beginning and end of the day when the Wayne employees are relocated to Delaware.

He said also that, after the Memorial Day observance holiday on May 29, the company will follow, until Labor Day, a summer work schedule. That shifts arrivals and departures from the traditional rush hours with the incentive of taking Friday afternoons off in return for working longer on the other days.

Wutka said first phase of building the road network will get underway in January, 2002, with the seeking of bids to construct the so-called local roads – essentially the realignment of Augustine Cut-off – on the west side of Concord Pike.

Contracts for the east side will follow a year later.

With those roads in place to also serve as detours from the pike during construction , bids will be sought in January, 2004, for the most elaborate part of the project -- to rebuild Concord Pike, including a bilevel partial interchange to replace the present Foulk Road intersection.

A connector can then be built the following year between the interchange and Powder Mill Road, a highway now being called the Delaware 141 spur. Last phase, to be bid in early 2006 would be reconstruction of the section of Concord Pike involving a partial intersection with Augustine Cut-off and an expanded I-95 interchange.

Parks division official Mark Chura presented a plan calling for enlarging Rock Manor golf course from 5,800 yards to 6,200 yards. A driving range – being called a golf training facility – also would be constructed.

Several multipurpose and practice recreational fields, a playground and a park for unleashed dogs are planning.

He said it will be feasible to preserve and put as-yet-undermined uses the Blue Ball barn and two historic houses along Rockland Road.

The large mound of DelDOT dirt along Concord Pike, just north of Foulk Road, will give way, he said, to several ‘swales’ for controlling stormwater runoff

He said New Castle County has expressed interest in managing the recreational part of the park site under a lease arrangement and that talks are to be held with Wilmington officials and the nonprofit management company which runs the golf course, to determine how that facility will be run.

Chura later told Delaforum that the state expects to complete acquisition of the remaining 70 acres of the site this summer. It has an agreement to do so with Al-Zar Ltd., the real estate arm of the Nemours Foundation, but Al-Zar and a former prospective developer are involved in litigation over whether there should be a division of the $3.1 million of proceeds from the sale.

Completion of a park master plan in July "would be an appropriate time to move forward to acquire the land," he said. He said, however, there was no deadline and, other than acknowledging that it is a possible option, declined to speculate on whether the state agency would use the right of eminent domain and condemn the property for public taking.

DelDOT’s assistant chief engineer, Carolann Wicks, said after the meeting that there was nothing inconsistent in her telling it that need for a new McConnell bridge would be studied although follow-up plans to build a new structure evidently are in place.

"That is a unique area. What we hope to do is identify needs and types of problems and reach a consensus," she said.

Debate on whether to expand the bridge from two to four lanes – most likely by building a new span – has been a long-running controversy. County Council, in effect, waded into it by including in the Astra Zeneca waiver ordinance a provision, again nonbinding, calling on DelDOT to "proceed with the scheduled construction of the Tyler McConnell Bridge improvements in [fiscal year] 2003."