Mayor Bloomberg opened the door yesterday to revising the complicated financing scheme that critics have used as a brickbat against his proposal to redevelop Manhattan’s far West Side. After months of a very public battle over the project, the first semblance of possible compromise is beginning to emerge.

In recent months, the Independent Budget Office, the city comptroller, and then, yesterday, the City Council speaker and the city’s public advocate, have all voiced reservations about how the Bloomberg administration proposed to pay for the multibillion-dollar project. The proposal would transform the far West Side between 30th and 42nd streets from old rail yards to a football stadium, an expanded convention center, and extensive commercial and residential development.

While many city officials seem to agree that extending the no. 7 subway line, building a platform over the Hudson Rail Yards, and expanding the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center would revitalize a blighted area of the city, they have balked at the way Mr. Bloomberg proposes to pay for it.

As proposed by the mayor, the planned $1.4 billion New York Jets stadium – centerpiece of the city’s bid for the 2012 Olympics – would require $600 million in public money. That has been a point of contention.

Mr. Bloomberg appeared open to bridging those differences yesterday. He conceded his plan was “a more expensive, riskier way to finance,” but he said: “It is the only way we have come up with in which we’d be able to finance this. It is always nice to say let’s look at other alternatives, and if someone comes along and wants to loan us money at a lower price, we’d love to have them do it.”

The mayor’s comments came the same day the council speaker, Gifford Miller, made his position on the project public, at a breakfast address to a construction trade group, and the public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, held a press conference to argue that the stadium would cost more than the mayor said.

Mr. Miller said he was “not opposed to a sports and convention center in principle” and pledged that he would not stand in the way of rezoning the area, as the mayor’s plan requires, but he said he was troubled by the financing plan and the administration’s failure to issue the usual requests for proposals.

On the question of financing, Mr. Bloomberg has proposed relying on a quasi-independent entity, called the Transitional Finance Authority, to issue short-term debt to cover some of the development costs of the project. Because those bonds would be paid for with future real-estate revenues, or potentially would need to be partly purchased by the city, the approach leaves the city financially vulnerable and, Mr. Miller said yesterday, ends up unnecessarily driving up costs.

“This deal will cost the city an extra $1.3 billion,” Mr. Miller said at the New York Building Congress, calculating that the city would be paying significantly higher interest rates to bondholders because the revenue streams are speculative. He said the council’s Finance Committee would hold open public hearings in the coming weeks to discuss the issue.

“I will fight alongside the Bloomberg administration if they will join me in a financing plan that is open, honest, and included in our capital budget,” Mr. Miller said.

That may be where the compromise lies.

“I think Gifford’s position could have been a lot worse,” the director of government and legislative affairs for the Mason Tenders District Council, Michael McGuire, said. “He could have come out and said this is absolutely a terrible thing.”

Instead, Mr. Miller has provided an opening. If his bottom-line concern is money, then it might be an issue Mr. Bloomberg can resolve.

While everyone has focused on the current financing schemes to get the various parts of the project done, what has gone largely unnoticed is that the administration has already modified some of its financing plans to make them more palatable to critics.

Originally, the financing on the Hudson Yards was tax increment financing, then it was changed to something like a quasi-independent authority before it evolved into the Transitional Finance Authority of today.

People familiar with municipal financing said there is no reason to believe, as one expert put it, that “this current financing is written in stone, because it isn’t.”

That may be why the mayor, at an event at Rockefeller University yesterday, said he found the comments by Mr. Miller – who is likely to run

for mayor next year – “very encouraging.” Mr. Bloomberg floated the possibility that he would entertain other financing options if they were presented.

“The trouble is that the capital budget has some legal limitations,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “In the end we’ll have to work with Gifford Miller and satisfy him.”

The deputy director of the Independent Budget Office, George Sweeting, said the financing options for the project are almost endless.

“At the Hudson Yards you could conceivably do the rezoning to make development possible and then come up with a financing scheme that was not dependent on the development in that area,” he said. “Or they could do some portion of that with the capital budget. There are lots of possibilities.”

There is also the potential that the New York Jets, who have promised $800 million to help build the stadium – called the New York Sports and Convention Center – could sweeten their offer.

While Mr. Bloomberg chose to be encouraged by Mr. Miller’s lukewarm support for the West Side project yesterday, he still has a long way to go before the project gets off the ground. The plan needs Albany’s approval, the governor has to sign off, as does the Economic Development Corporation at both the city and state levels. Further, the stadium’s opponents are expected to file a lawsuit, which could further slow the project.

“If you go back to the history of big projects in this city, most of them have started in tough times, oddly enough, and because of that most of them use innovative financing methods,” Mr. Bloomberg said. To get his project approved, some more innovation is probably in the offing.

The Jets hope to begin construction next spring and open the stadium in 2009.