Mayor Bloomberg’s Democratic challengers said yesterday that as the city’s CEO the mayor has neglected Lower Manhattan redevelopment because he’s been preoccupied with winning approval to build a stadium for the New York Jets on the West Side.

Some news organizations reported yesterday that the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs has suspended its plans to build a $2 billion, 40-story tower just north of the World Trade Center site. In response to those reports, some of the candidates lining up for Mr. Bloomberg’s job said the mayor should have intervened earlier to prevent the situation from boiling over.

The Democrat leading in the polls, Fernando Ferrer, said Goldman had made a “generational commitment” that needed to be taken seriously by both Mr. Bloomberg and Governor Pataki.

Goldman, according to several sources, put the brakes on its planned tower because executives were uneasy about a tunnel being proposed under West Street near its building. The tunnel’s northern tube would open at Goldman’s front entrance, bringing sometimes-dense vehicular traffic to the firm’s doorstep. In addition, a spokesman for the firm, Peter Rose, was quoted as saying, “Uncertainty of the master plan for the whole neighborhood makes it difficult to finalize plans for our building and begin construction.”

“If Goldman has a concern about this tunnel, that concern has to be met now,” Mr. Ferrer, former Bronx borough president, said. “This is too important a commitment to let fall through the cracks.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Bloomberg, Jennifer Falk, chalked the Democrats’ criticism up to election-year rhetoric.

“This is politically motivated speculation by individuals who have no real knowledge of what it takes to get a deal of this enormity done,” she said in an email statement.

“As Goldman Sachs, the governor and the LMDC can attest, we have been working together aggressively to address the outstanding issues and are optimistic that we will be able to resolve them,” the mayor’s spokeswoman said.

The company, which was aiming to complete its flagship headquarters by 2009 and fill it with nearly 10,000 employees, said it is considering other options but plans to stay in Manhattan. It hasn’t made a final decision on whether or not to abort the project.

Mr. Bloomberg, who has reputation for keeping negotiations private rather than allowing them to play out in the headlines, said yesterday the city was taking Goldman’s business “phenomenally seriously.” The multibillionaire founder of Bloomberg LLP said he hoped the company ultimately decided to stay in Lower Manhattan at Site 26, the plot Goldman had planned to build on, between Vesey and Barclay streets.

“Any process like this, when you are trying to build something, has lots of ebbs and flows and pluses and minuses,” the mayor said.

When asked what the administration was doing to keep the company downtown, he stuck to his usual form: “We are working with them. We don’t bribe people to stay. We are doing everything in their interest to stay there.”

Several mayoral hopefuls criticized the agreement that Messrs. Bloomberg and Pataki seem to have forged, which gives each of them a different area of Manhattan to focus on. Mr. Bloomberg has the West Side, where he wants to build a domed football stadium that would also serve as a convention center and, if the city wins the 2012 games, as the prime Olympic venue. Mr. Pataki has Lower Manhattan, where much of the development falls under the state run Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s purview.

“It seems to me that the mayor has kind of gotten away with making this downtown-for-West-Side deal with the governor,” Rep. Anthony Weiner, another of Mr. Bloomberg’s Democratic challengers, said.

“I don’t think that people of the city of New York got a good deal there,” the Brooklyn-Queens congressman said. “We need the mayor and this administration focused like a laser beam on downtown development, and not just on the West Side.”

The speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, another Democrat hoping to make it past the primary and challenge Mr. Bloomberg in November’s general election, said he was concerned with the pace of building in Lower Manhattan.

“I think that the mayor has neglected almost everything in favor of a football stadium,” he said yesterday when asked about the Goldman project at a City Hall news conference.

“I think tunneling the West Side Highway is a big mistake at enormous taxpayer expense that is not going to reap any real benefits,” he said.

A spokesman for Goldman Sachs did not return calls yesterday but was quoted as saying “the governor and mayor have been extraordinarily responsive to our concerns.”

A professor of urban planning at Columbia University, Susan Fainstein, said that while Goldman’s commitment to building downtown is crucial, the firm’s leaders may not be “totally serious” about their plans to halt construction entirely.

“I see this as part of a prolonged process of negotiations,” Ms. Fainstein said during a phone interview yesterday.

She said that solidifying development in Lower Manhattan has been a problem because no single agency or person has taken responsibility and it’s “not clear who the final decision maker is.”

“I see this negotiation as really being between Goldman and the governor’s office,” she said. “But,” she added, “the governor has not been consistent in his interest in downtown.”

A spokeswoman for the governor’s office, Lynn Rasic, said there would be a resolution and Goldman would “move forward with their plans.”

An executive at the commercial real-estate firm Julien J. Studley, Woody Heller, said rebuilding Lower Manhattan is a long-term process and the city and state seemed to be “thoughtful and responsible” in dealing with it,

Mr. Heller said Goldman Sachs, like any other business of its size and stature, is important to that process. But he said downtown would be “okay” without the firm.

“I don’t know what incentive package they’ve been offered,” Mr. Heller said. “I think the city should do everything that’s appropriate and reasonable, but I don’t think they should give away the store.”