New York ? Stung by criticism that the initial six proposals for redeveloping the World Trade Center are too commercial, the officials charged with rebuilding the site say they may extend the timeline for selecting a final plan.

“The goal is to get it right,” Matthew Higgins, a spokesman for the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., said Sunday. “Now that we’ve received public input we have to evaluate how to refine the plans to better reflect what people hope to see in Lower Manhattan.”

Many of the 4,000 people who attended a town hall meeting Saturday expressed dissatisfaction with the six plans released last week.

“They’re getting too restrictive too soon,” said Priya Matthew, of Harrison, N.J. “We’re going to end up with something very mediocre.”

Such comments echoed the views of critics in the architecture and design community.

“It is rather like taking the downtown skyline of some average American burg and plopping it in one of the most prominent and symbolically important sites of our times,” The Washington Post’s architecture critic Benjamin Forgey.

Each plan for the 16-acre site includes a memorial to the victims of the Sept. 11 attack plus 11 million square feet of office space and 600,000 square feet each of retail and hotel space to replace the lost space.

Officials from the development corporation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the land, had earlier insisted that such intensive commercial development was dictated by the terms of the Port Authority’s lease with developer Larry Silverstein and his partner, mall operator Westfield America.

But Port Authority Executive Director Joseph Seymour said Saturday that the agency would re-examine its agreement.

“Larry Silverstein has a leasehold interest on the site that requires him to build what was there,” Seymour said. “We all know that’s impractical for many reasons. It means there has to be a negotiation, but now is not the time to do that.”

Robert Yaro, the president of the Regional Plan Association, said, “I think we got a resounding sense that the Port Authority program has to go. … I understand that they’ve got a lease, but we’ve got to work with them to renegotiate that lease.”

The development corporation and the Port Authority had set a deadline of September for narrowing the six plans to three and a final deadline of December for choosing a single land-use plan. Those dates may now be pushed back.

“We have to see if that next phase of the timeline is realistic,” said Louis Tomson, the president and executive director of the development corporation. “We have to make this work, and if it takes a month or two in a different direction, then it takes a month more, or two or three.”