There may be a creative way to find money to build a new Silver Spring civic building as it was originally designed, including an ice rink and pavilion, county officials told the Silver Spring Citizens Advisory Board Monday night.

"It's clearly on everyone in county government's radar screen," said County Council President Thomas E. Perez (D-Dist. 5) of Takoma Park.

Right now, he and other officials are brainstorming and Perez said he's convinced they'll find a way to make the project happen.

Currently, Perez said he's talking to a Virginia skating rink about the possibility of owning and operating a rink in Silver Spring.

Another option would be similar to what was done with Germantown's Black Rock Center for the Arts, where the county established an amenity fund to finance larger public-space projects to which developers building new structures could contribute. Sometimes amenity funds work and sometimes they're a challenge, Perez said.

It may be a challenge to find county money, he added, because there are a number of competing priorities in the budget.

"If you have an idea, we're all ears," he said.

The design process for the civic building needs to keep moving forward, said Paul Folkers, assistant chief administrative officer for Montgomery County. Should the design not initially include the ice rink and pavilion, there will still be opportunities to include those amenities in the future. The county also is looking into other ways to fund those features, like obtaining private money.

But it's important for officials to remember that the community is concerned about more than the ice rink and pavilion, said Jon Lourie, a Silver Spring resident and member of the advisory board as well as the committee that worked on the civic building. "The other aspect of it that I think we need to talk about is the building itself."

There has been a significant reduction in the size of the building, Lourie said, "to a point where I think it's kind of impacting some of the program elements that were planned."

Plans for the building were recently scaled back, eliminating some space from the building itself, as well as an outdoor skating rink and pavilion. The move didn't sit well with some residents who said they wanted the public space promised to them when officials tore down the Silver Spring Armory, a public meeting space, in 1998 to make room for redevelopment.

The Silver Spring Citizens Advisory Board has formed a task force to determine the importance of an ice rink in the downtown and talk to the County Council and county executive about appropriating more money for the project. A final project design has not yet come before the council.

Plans for the building -- which will function as a town center -- still include a great hall, atrium and several community rooms, as well as space for the Silver Spring Regional Services Center offices and rooms for the Round House Theatre. However, spaces are slightly smaller. A proposed revised design has cut about 4,000 square feet from the building, originally slated to be 45,000 square feet.

"If we don't address some of the shortfalls of the building, we fear that will be lost sooner," Lourie said.

There have been no major changes made to the project since 1998 when it was budgeted for, he said, yet it could be reduced for monetary reasons.

Lourie said he hopes government will act responsibly. If government is going to plan a project "and we're going to allocate money for it, then we're going to follow through."

The budget for the civic building, created in 1998, was about $12 million, said Tom Pogue, community outreach manager for the county's Department of Public Works and Transportation. The project is currently over budget by $4 million.

Eliminating the ice rink and pavilion would save about $1.5 million. Reducing the size of the building would save about $2.5 million.

Construction costs in the last year or two have gone up by about 20 percent, Pogue said. That's something difficult to predict, and also difficult to figure into a budget.

"There have been various issues, I think, that affected this project, affected other projects," he said. "You all heard about Strathmore Hall."

Strathmore Hall Arts Center, which opened this year in north Bethesda, ran $9.6 million over budget due to unexpected building costs. After saying for years they wouldn't give any more money to that project, the County Council allocated an extra $6.6 million to that project in February 2004 to complete the project, with the Strathmore Hall Foundation covering the rest of the cost. In total, that project cost about $100 million.