"I have been told by the county executive [Thomas Gordon] that, if the building is made a little smaller, there will be money to make it nicer," said Second District Council Robert Weiner.

About 80 people – including a large number from Windsor Hills, which is across Foulk Road from the park – crowded a Sunday school classroom in St. Paul United Methodist Church, adjacent to the park, for an update on the long-anticipated project.

Weiner and Ann Hampton, who has primary responsibilities for libraries in the county's Community Services Department, revealed that thinking has shifted from regarding the library as a regional facility serving the northern half of the county to one primarily for Brandywine Hundred. It no longer is assumed that people from the Greenville, Centreville and Hockessin areas will patronize it to any great extent, they said.

Hampton said an architectural firm, the Hillier Group of Princeton, N.J., is working on preliminary conceptual plans and everything is on the most recently announced schedule, which looks for the library to be operational before June 30, 2004. It was disclosed that a construction manager, New Castle-based Wohlsen Construction Co., also has been hired.

Initial plans should be ready to be made public in about two months, she said.

As soon as the plans are ready, Friends of the Concord Pike Library, a volunteer organization affiliated with the library in Talleyville, which Talley-Day is to replace, will be able to begin a public fund-raising effort. The state has provided $4 million to build it; the county $3 million. Private contributions, primarily from foundations, are to provide the remaining $3 million of the estimated cost.

Hampton said July is the "critical point" at which basic design and specific location within the park must be decided if construction is to happen in fiscal 2004. She promised "larger community involvement" in arriving at the decisions which must be made between now and July.

The meeting, part of a series of 'community-input' sessions arranged by Weiner, struggled with generalities during the presentation.

Talk of a smaller library, for instance, seemed to beg the question of how much smaller than the previously proposed 40,000 square feet is envisioned. The present library is 15,000 square feet.

Philip Lavelle, of Silverside Road, for instance, cautioned against "building a library that could turn out to be too small in 10 years." Jeremiah Shea, of Buckingham Heights, said that cost, aesthetics and function have to be balanced, but that function should be the determining factor.

Hampton said that providing for implementation of rapidly advancing information technology is the biggest challenge facing libraries. "Nobody knows what's coming, so we have to be flexible to be able to accommodate whatever is coming," she said.

Attenders had an even greater problem getting a handle on 'stately'. When Rose explained that meant the building "will architecturally make a better statement," it didn't do much to alleviate the confusion.

"If we're going to spend $2 million of $10 million on stately, we at least should know what stately is," one attender said. "I think the White House is stately, but I certainly wouldn't want it in my backyard," another remarked.

Rose touched off even more spirited dissent when he said it "has been pretty well decided that [the library] will go in the right-hand front quadrant" of the park.

Since Gordon proposed more than a year ago to situate it well back into the park, on former farmland about 100 feet from Nordic Dell – a community which didn't exist when Talley-Day Park was chosen as the library site several years ago – there has been a tug-of-war between folks in that development and those in Windsor Hills.

Weiner, who said he wants the library in a "location that doesn't bother anybody" and is willing "to part ways with the county executive on this issue," said he is adamantly opposed to the library being either directly on Foulk Road at the part entrance or abutting Nordic Dell. He proposed that it be "somewhere about halfway" between the front of the park and where Gordon proposed. Weiner, a Republican, has been highly supportive of Gordon, a Democrat, and his administration.

Jonathan Husband, who has parks responsibility in Community Services, then displayed a diagram of a proposed completed layout of the park, now only about a third developed, which showed the library could still be located in the front quadrant, but be set back about 600 feet from the road. That would be at about the rear tree line viewed when turning into the existing parking area from Foulk Road.