The Montgomery County Council is holding off on the controversial blueprint for a 900-acre "Science City" between Gaithersburg and Rockville while key aspects of a comprehensive strategy for the future of the county's biotech sector take shape.

The council had intended to settle the Gaithersburg West Master Plan by the end of the year. Now, the council will first finish the master plan proposed for White Flint — pushing Gaithersburg West into January or February, said Councilman Michael J. Knapp, chairman of the committee that has wrangled with the plan's details for the past month.

Foremost is the much-anticipated report from the Biosciences Task Force that County Executive Isiah Leggett created last year to refashion the county's biotech strategy for decades to come.

County officials are also on the verge of inking a "memorandum of understanding" with Johns Hopkins University that would lay out the research giant's commitment in Montgomery County — especially at its 107-acre Belward farm, the only undeveloped large plot in Gaithersburg West. The new timeline gives the council more time to finish rewriting two zoning guidelines that will lay the groundwork for most of Gaithersburg West — the "Life Sciences Center" zone and the "Commercial Residential" zone — talks for which have dragged out for weeks.

Bringing those pieces into focus will give the council a better sense of how much development Gaithersburg West needs to allow for and why, said Knapp, a former biotech consultant.

"My goal is to begin to build some momentum so we can have some context as to why the Gaithersburg West plan makes sense," he said. "... All of a sudden you've got two or three steps in the right direction and you can show where this fits in a broader context."

Neighbors and civic activists have called on the council to scale back from the County Planning Board's version of Gaithersburg West, which would allow the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center to triple in commercial space, employment and housing over the next 30 and 40 years. The brunt of their skepticism falls on the claim that 20 million square feet of research and commercial space — at least 4.5 million of it at the Belward farm —is needed to create a critical mass that would spark innovation and attract a federal institution such as the National Institutes of Health.

Knapp (D-Dist. 2) of Germantown approached Hopkins about the MOU last month. Hopkins responded with a draft Friday night.

"This is something that Hopkins put its energy behind and got out in unprecedented, record time to show our interest in Montgomery County," said Elaine Amir, executive director of Hopkins's 38-acre campus in Rockville, which holds 4,000 graduate students and 13 life science companies.

Hopkins and county officials would not discuss the MOU's terms while the negotiation is ongoing.

The moves come amid mounting concerns that Gaithersburg West will create an east-west rift between the Interstate 270 corridor — widely hailed as the engine to Maryland's biotech industry — and the emerging biotech corridor in eastern Montgomery.

Community leaders there — including councilwomen Nancy Navarro and Valerie Ervin — worry that growth in Gaithersburg West will come at the expense of the Route 29 corridor, where the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is consolidating its headquarters, Washington Adventist Hospital wants to relocate from Takoma Park and the county is establishing a 2,000-worker life science incubator.

But with its 40,000 new jobs, Gaithersburg West will create a "profound imbalance" between the western and eastern corridors, according to William Strassberger, chairman of the East County Citizen's Advisory Board.

"[T]his divide is likely to deepen unless we find ways to balance the county's economic development policies," Strassberger wrote Monday in a letter to Navarro.

Some county officials and biotech leaders believe that careful coordination will make the corridors complimentary. The Bioscience Task Force's report will help chart that course, said Steven Silverman, director of the county's Department of Economic Development.

But if Gaithersburg West ends up laying claim to so much job growth, County Council President Philip M. Andrews says the assertion does not hold up.

"I don't buy the argument that you can have as much as you want everywhere," said Andrews (D-Dist. 3) of Gaithersburg.