A task force on the Dorothea Dix hospital campus gave co-chairs Rep. Jennifer Weiss and Sen. Vernon Malone vague guidelines for drawing up a final plan.

That upset advocates who wanted the task force to endorse creating a major urban park on the 300-acre property just west of downtown Raleigh.

The guidelines call for the legislature to consider accommodating 3,000 state workers, reusing historic buildings, creating a park and allowing new commercial and residential uses with minimal state funding. But they do not provide specific details on how any of that would be done. The only specific recommendation is that money from the sale go to the state's Mental Health Trust Fund.

The task force, which met for the last time Monday, is considering what to do with the site of the state mental hospital when it closes in 2008. Last year, it hired the nonprofit Urban Land Institute to draw up a specific proposal for the property.

The guidelines mostly line up with that proposal, which called for Raleigh to create a new nonprofit to buy the land for $40 million. But they are broad enough to cover seven other plans put forward by advocates, city planners and a Charlotte design firm.

Two members argued against giving Weiss and Malone such wide leeway as they write legislation, saying the task force should take a stronger stance in favor of a major urban park.

Barbara Goodmon, president of the A.J. Fletcher Foundation, said she didn't know if the two legislators would be able to stop "wheeler-dealers" in the General Assembly from selling valuable real estate on Dix Hill to private developers.

"I feel OK about everybody in here," she said. "I don't feel OK about everybody else."

But the other six voting members of the task force at the meeting said that Weiss and Malone need room to negotiate with their colleagues in the legislature, who will make the final decision on the site.

"We have to get 61 votes in the House and 26 votes in the Senate," Weiss said. "We need flexibility."

Greg Poole, leader of the pro-park Dix Visionaries, said that the guidelines would end up creating a much smaller park on the unusable parts of the property along the Rocky Branch Creek and on top of an old city landfill.

"All they would give us as a park is wetlands and a landfill," he said.

Rep. Deborah Ross said several recommendations in the guidelines essentially call for a major park. She noted that they include making the property "a destination" and creating "active and passive recreation."

"I can't imagine in my wildest dreams that there will not be a large park up there," she said.

But task force member Joseph Huberman, who belongs to the nonprofit Friends of Dorothea Dix Park, said that the guidelines also call for considering commercial and residential uses that would undermine a park.

"This is property that belongs to the state of North Carolina, and it shouldn't be given over to private use," he said. "It certainly shouldn't be turned into a strip mall or a subdivision."