The first time half a dozen government agencies came together to write a plan for demolishing the former Deutsche Bank building, it took them more than a year to reach a consensus.

Regulators, led by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, sent back more than 20 pages in early 2005 filled with suggestions for changes to the first draft. Six months later, after a second draft was drawn up to meet their specifications, they came up with 40 more pages of comments and suggestions. The bullet points ranged from a proposal to create emergency response procedures to notes such as “replace ‘until’ with ‘unless’ in the last sentence of the third paragraph on page 7.”

Now the demolition is idle again as the same regulators come together with the building’s owner, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, to hammer out a revised plan in the wake of a fire that killed two firefighters at the building last month. Their task is to add another layer of rules and procedures to protect firefighters in a project already described as one of the most complicated and regulated in the history of New York.

The LMDC chairman, Avi Schick, waxed optimistic yesterday morning about the possibilities of reaching a consensus quickly on a revised plan for taking down the former bank building, which was damaged and contaminated when the World Trade Center towers collapsed on September 11, 2001.

This time, “it will absolutely be different. It’s not going to take years,” he said, predicting that in “a couple of weeks,” the LMDC would be able to roll out a new deconstruction plan.

“We will bring that wretched building down,” he said.

Still, early indications show that the negotiations over how to proceed with the Deutsche Bank demolition may turn out to be as tricky as the first round.

Already — before the discussion over the deconstruction plan has even begun — the LMDC is bumping heads with the EPA over when the damaged building should be resealed to keep contaminants from escaping into the surrounding area.

The EPA, which is focused on air quality after it was heavily criticized for its assurances that the air in Lower Manhattan was safe after September 11, says the windows blown out during the fire should be resealed immediately. The LMDC, which is being investigated for its role in the fire, has said an elevator on the south side of the building must be shored up before the building is sealed in order to meet fire department requirements.

Even after twice-a-day meetings for the past two weeks, the two sides have yet to reach an agreement.

“We had a plan to do the shoring up last week, and that wasn’t acceptable to the regulators,” Mr. Schick said at a community meeting this week.

Asked whether the recent discussions between the LMDC and the various regulators have been “rocky,” the World Trade Center coordinator for the EPA, Pat Evangelista, said: “The answer is a clear yes in my view.”

Before the fire on August 18, the plan had been to finish the deconstruction by December 31.

Mr. Evangelista said that once the discussion about a deconstruction plan gets under way in a few weeks, after the resealing and fire safety issues are worked out, he expects the process to proceed as it did the first time. The LMDC will submit draft plans and the regulators will respond with comments — until every federal, state, and city agency involved is happy.