The Huntsville city council on Thursday night pushed back on a proposal from Mayor Tommy Battle, voting to delay a decision on a $4 million design contract for an amphitheater at the under-construction MidCity development.

The council peppered Battle and three of his high-ranking administration officials with questions and concerns about the project – a discussion that lasted almost an hour and ended with a 3-2 vote to table the issue until Jan. 24.

After the meeting, the mayor told AL.com that council members will receive a much more detailed presentation about the project next month in the hopes of swaying a majority to support it.

“I think we have some work to do,” Battle said. “I think it’s our job to come out and show the corridors we will affect, what it will do retail-wise, what our return on investment is and what it does as a value to our whole community. Obviously tonight, we haven’t hit that threshold. We haven’t achieved that goal.

“In four weeks, we’ll be able to sit down and go through that and lay out the whole plan on it and why we think this is the place it needs to be and what it does for our retail trade and what it does for Huntsville as a regional pull. After we get through with that, I think we can show it’s a good plan.”

We'll have a full story wrapping all this up @aldotcom on Friday AM. — Paul Gattis (@paul_gattis) December 21, 2018

The discussion about the amphitheater never became tense or contentious but council members were relentless in seeking more information about the project, which calls for a 8,500-seat outdoor entertainment facility at a cost of $25 million at the site of the former Madison Square Mall. That price tag will be covered through the city’s capital plan and could also include some borrowing through debt funding, City Administrator John Hamilton said.

And though the council tabled the matter for four weeks, the project appears far from dead. Councilmen Devyn Keith and Will Culver said they supported it and voted against the motion to table the issue. Those voting to delay making a decision – Frances Akridge, Bill Kling and Jennie Robinson – never said they opposed the amphitheater.

“I believe it’s going to be close,” Keith, the council president, said of the January vote.

Among the topics of concern raised by council members:

The city has done a lot of spending on quality-of-life projects in recent years and another major project – a new downtown city hall – is expected to come before the council for approval next year.

Putting the amphitheater at John Hunt Park, which is in the midst of a long-range makeover that will eventually top $50 million. Kling’s suggestion that abandoned Joe Davis Stadium could be used in some way to help offset the cost of the amphitheater was shot down by Hamilton, who said the stadium would only be a more expensive option.

Robinson expressed concern that the amphitheater would provide competition for the city-owned Von Braun Center, which itself is undergoing extensive renovation and expansion. Hamilton said competition for the VBC from other venues will be there with or without the amphitheater.

Keith said he was “uncomfortable” with the cost of the design contract and said approving that contract is tantamount to approving the amphitheater itself, which would come before the council for another vote in the future.

Akridge, the newly-elected council member who called for the issue to be tabled, said there were too many unanswered questions for her to support it Thursday night and, after the meeting, said the project comes down to “priorities.”

“I just don’t know why it has to be now,” Akridge said after the meeting. “And, it’s about priorities. And for me, I got elected to pay attention to neighbors and neighborhoods. And you know what? We don’t have enough roads being paved.”

City officials stressed that the location for the amphitheater is ideal because of its proximity to I-565 and it would be a catalyst for economic growth along the University Drive corridor, a critical area which city urban and planning director Shane Davis said accounts for 23 percent of the city’s sales tax revenue.