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Hoping to keep alive a development that would replace a car dealership on East Washington Avenue with an $84 million collection of retail and condominium buildings, Ald. Brenda Konkel is bringing the fight to the City Council.

This extraordinary step, which Konkel acknowledges she has never seen attempted in the course of the city's usual development process, is an attempt, she says, at keeping developer Gary Gorman and the city at the negotiating table.

Earlier this week, the city's influential Board of Estimates stopped short of approving a deal that Gorman had sought. It involved $4.2 million in public assistance for the project.

Gorman responded by writing to neighborhood groups Wednesday, telling them that the project they had worked on and come to support "appears to be dead."

"I can tell you that there was no hidden agenda or Plan B' that we have to present," he wrote. "We have put all of our cards on the table and presented honest numbers throughout the process."

The project that Gorman proposed had enthusiastic backing from neighbors, the mayor and the city's committees that oversee design and planning. But it fell apart in financial negotiations, with the Board of Estimates offering Gorman $2.2 million in tax incremental financing (TIF) up front and another $2 million loaned with strict assurances about the future of the two-phase development.

Gorman said that the guarantees the city wanted attached to the loan exposed him to too much risk and his company could not pursue the project under those terms.

Konkel said that failing to carry through with this project, on the 800 block of East Washington Avenue, would mean at least a five-year setback for transforming the area.

"This project was the hope of spurring development in the neighborhood," she said this morning.

Marsha Rummel, president of the Marquette Neighborhood Association, said that she understands the city's concern with extending taxpayer money on the project without the same guarantees it has secured in the past, but she said this development has been well thought out and represents significant change for the area.

"It's a really important project," she said today. "We're keeping our fingers crossed."

By bringing 300 or so affordably priced condominiums to the area, as well as business development, Rummel said, the project stood to help neighborhood schools, increase economic vitality and bring tax money set aside for improvements to the nearby land planned for a central park.

Furthermore, Rummel said, the neighbors of the project were fully involved as it was developed.

"It's a model for the kind of things we want to see," she said. "Hopefully, we don't waste what we've done so far."

Ald. Zach Brandon, who serves on the city's Board of Estimates, pointed out that Konkel did not support extending a $2 million loan without guarantees and he said that putting the same deal to the City Council would just result in the same conclusion.

He said that the project had other problems, including the phases planned for construction. Brandon said that a nine-story tower planned for East Washington Avenue -- probably the riskiest element -- should be built first, instead of beginning with condos on the back of the block and leaving a green space on East Washington for several years.

The mayor, who has been a supporter of the project, said in remarks Tuesday that in the future he would like the financial aspects of the project to be fully considered at the same time a design is brought forward. As the process stands, he said, too often a development gets many approvals, significant work from neighborhood groups and architects and then the financial negotiations begin in earnest, with the city at a considerable disadvantage.

His spokesman George Twigg said this morning that "we're certainly open to new ideas," to finance the project, adding that the development's design "represents everything the mayor's been championing" in terms of land-use and urban planning.

At the same time, though, Twigg said that he did not want to raise "unrealistic expectations that there's a silver bullet out there -- a solution that no one's thought of."