ORONO — The Town Council on Monday will consider halting negotiations with the U.S. Postal Service for its downtown location — once considered the leading site on which to locate the town’s new library.

The vote comes on the heels of a crowded Tuesday night meeting of the council’s library committee, which decided to put the matter before the full board.

The order will effectively drop from further consideration the post office site, which had already built opposition from neighbors concerned with further traffic in the already congested area on the corner of Forest Avenue and the Bennoch Road.

Committee member Janeen Teal said Wednesday that the move was designed to jump-start the arrival of the new library, which has been discussed for nearly five years.

“I think this just gets us going again,” she said.

Instead of the post office proposal, which had become bogged down in lengthy negotiations, the committee will likely explore sites on Birch Street and in the municipal complex, Teal said.

The town library has shared space with the Orono High School library since 1962. But the cramped quarters prompted the council in 1996 to vote to separate the two facilities.

Most recently, the downtown post office site became the first choice of committee members after the U.S. Postal Service moved its sorting and distribution operations to the industrial park off Exit 51.

The town had been talking with post office officials about converting the site for about 10 months.

While the post office may have been the most recent site of choice for the new library, it wasn’t the first.

Last year, a volunteer committee zeroed in on Webster Park, a riverfront site that drew significant opposition in the form of a petition signed by roughly 8 percent of the registered voters in town.

The park site was dropped after several contentious community meetings on the topic.

Town Manager Gerry Kempen said Wednesday that public opinion on the library’s construction, as of late, seemed to tip toward expedience.

“I think people just thought the negotiations with the post office could go on for months or years, and then we could end up with nothing,” Kempen said. “People just felt there was no end in sight.”

Also at Tuesday’s meeting, the issue of publicly funding the library’s design again rose to the fore.

While present plans call for the library’s construction to be privately funded, recent discussions have centered on funding the building’s design with taxpayer dollars. Initial estimates suggest design costs to approach $100,000.

Teal said should the council consider using public funds for the project, the matter would be discussed in public hearings this spring. The full proposal would likely be put to voters in the November election if the council opted to fund part of the project, she said.

Monday’s Town Council meeting will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the council chambers.