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As the County Council considers whether to fund a proposal to move four major industrial facilities to the Webb Tract near Montgomery Village, community leaders from surrounding neighborhoods have taken a stance of cooperation, not confrontation.

"I hate to word it this way: They are coming. We don't necessarily like certain aspects of it ... but it's coming," said Bob Hydorn, president of the Montgomery Village Foundation's board of directors.

A coalition of the Montgomery Village Foundation, Flower Hill and homeowners associations in Montgomery Village formed in March, entirely opposed to the proposal to use the Webb Tract for a new police and fire/rescue training academy, county school system's food distribution center and maintenance depots for the school system and parks department.

The coalition started an online petition with a goal of collecting 3,000 signatures. As of last week, it had 22, according to the petition.

Montgomery county officials have agreed to take residents on a tour of the Public Safety Training Academy, which is on Great Seneca Highway and Key West Avenue south of Gaithersburg. Also, County Executive Isiah Leggett has expressed interest in hosting design "charettes" to give residents a formal say, Hydorn said, and will continue to have twice-monthly meetings with community leaders.

Responding to residents' concerns, the county has tweaked plans to have less of an impact — the PSTA's "burn building" was moved further from homes and most of a parcel known as Lot 7 will be kept as a buffer between homes in East Village and the PSTA's driving tracks.

Cooperation can lead to more concessions, said Terry O'Grady, president of the Mid-County Citizens Alliance. She wants all of Lot 7 dedicated as a park, a sound wall with a tree buffer, curtailed hours of operation and better traffic control on Snouffer School Road.

Already, Leggett is considering moving the food warehouse to the east side of Webb Tract. That would allow the PSTA to be further away from homes in the East Village neighborhood.

If the County Council approves the funding, the county facilities at the Webb Tract would be fully occupied by April 2012.

The plans for the Webb Tract are part of Leggett's "Smart Growth Initiative," which he announced in December 2007 as a way to relocate more than a dozen facilities.

So far, the council has approved the $107 million project to move the police and fire departments' headquarters into the office building at the GE Tech Park in Gaithersburg; the $49 million purchase of the Finmarc building next door as the future home of the county's Department of Liquor Control; and the $36.7 million purchase of the Casey 6 and 7 parcels off Shady Grove Road, where Leggett wants to build the county's Equipment and Maintenance Operations Center.

Leggett and the Webb Tract's owner, the Northern Virginia developer Miller and Smith, reached terms more than three months ago for an all-cash, $46.6 million purchase. That letter of intent sets a closing date of Sept. 30.

Some council members have been unconvinced that the PSTA needs to be moved. At a session with two county council committees Thursday, county staff made the case that renovating the training academy would fall far short of meeting future needs.

When the PSTA was built in 1973, the police department has a staff of 500, said Assistant Chief Drew Tracy. It is now 1,200 and the PSTA has never had a renovation or major upgrade.

Councilmembers also called for a formal "program of requirements," which details the needs and uses at a facility. That has not been done for the PSTA since 1998. Though they did not have a formal POR, county staff did a rough update.

"Short of an absolute gutting," it will be prohibitively expensive to meet those needs by renovating the existing PSTA to the point of being energy efficient and meeting environmental standards, said David Dise, director of the county's Department of General Services. Razing and building a new one "would be a nightmare at the very least" to train in neighboring jurisdictions, said fire chief Richard Bowers. Phasing in renovations and additions would take about 30 months, increasing work costs and subsequent operating costs.

"No matter what we do, it will always be, at its core, a 30-year-old building," Dise said.