ATHENS, Ga. --- A consultant's report on expanding the Medical College of Georgia was a home run for Athens, calling for an even larger medical school than originally proposed.

The consulting firm Tripp Umbach last week recommended building a 240-student MCG satellite at the Navy Supply Corps School campus on Prince Avenue, so large that administrators aren't even sure they can accommodate it.

The recommendation pleased University of Georgia administrators, said Tim Burgess, the vice president for finance and administration.

"They made it out to be a statewide challenge, and we were focused on what we wanted to do here," he said.

Though Tripp Umbach's recommendation differs in numbers from UGA's January 2007 proposal to take over the Navy school, it fulfills local officials' requirements when they agreed last year to hand over the base to the university. If UGA fails to gather political and financial support for a physician training program by May 2010, half the base will be opened to private development.

"Their commitment to us is a four-year medical school," and the recommendation includes that, said Buddy Allen, the chairman of the Navy School Local Redevelopment Authority. "It sounds to me that that's what (the Tripp Umbach) plan is."

Space on the 58-acre campus will be tight, so adding medical students could mean cutting other health sciences programs that UGA plans to house on the site. But authority members viewed the medical school as the economic driving force behind the proposal and didn't want it to merely consist of moving existing programs from the main UGA campus.

"The fact that they have additional students might mean they might not have space for other things they want to do with the property, but as far as the community, it's a bonus," Mr. Allen said.

The university's plans call for the base to house the College of Public Health, the Center for Health and Risk Communication, nursing and allied health programs, a continuing and distance education center, a library, a student center, research facilities and an MCG-run medical school.

Some of the programs will go into seven historic buildings and two other buildings with a total of 168,000 square feet that will be renovated immediately after the Navy leaves, currently scheduled for May 2011.

Plans also call for 17 new buildings, mostly on the northern half of the base, for a total of about 1 million square feet of new construction.

"We want to fulfill all the plans we've talked about, and then see if we can move to 60 (students per class)," Mr. Burgess said.

UGA officials hope to open the medical school in the summer of 2009 -- a year earlier than the report recommends -- in a building off the Navy school campus that would be converted to a research facility when the Navy school is vacated, Mr. Burgess said.