I worry for the success of the National Coast Guard Museum.

The daring downtown New London site, it seemed to me from the time of its unveiling, was just shy of genius, providing the museum with a spectacular waterfront venue, nestled between a deepwater pier and an historic train station, with good highway and train access to the Northeast Corridor.

Unlike the original Fort Trumbull site, the glassy, bold new museum would also become an anchor for the downtown, bringing tourists and business investment.

Indeed, I think some of the new projects on long-abandoned buildings downtown might be traced to museum enthusiasm. Early success.

It also seemed to me that museum officials, in selecting their site, must have done their due diligence, ensuring it was appropriate and buildable. How else could they get this far?

After all, the state had pledged $20 million for a bridge over the railroad tracks, signaling, to me anyway, that the logistics of the difficult site had been addressed and there was an engineered solution.

So imagine my surprise recently, while chatting with Rob Klee, commissioner of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, to hear him describe it as a "difficult site" and not necessarily permissible as a location for the Coast Guard Museum.

He specifically noted its close proximity to the water and location in a flood plain.

Yikes.

Klee said DEEP officials have seen no detailed drawings for the museum and could not make any determination whether it can be built on that site until an application is made and a review completed.

Klee said the department, as it always does, urged museum officials to present detailed plans "as soon as possible" to determine whether the project can go forward.

Wes Pulver, executive director of the museum association, acknowledged, when I asked him about it this week, that there are "some challenges" in building on the site.

He said the kind of detailed drawings DEEP would like to see are expensive, and the association is waiting to finish other studies related to the site before investing in full plans.

The sand, though, is running out in the time glass, it seems to me.

If this project were a sinking boat, you would have put copters in the air by now. The tentative opening date has been officially moved from 2018 to 2020.

If it is not certain yet if it can be built where they want, 2020 seems especially optimistic to me.

I asked Pulver if they would consider the original site, at Fort Trumbull, if the downtown location doesn't work out.

He seemed reluctant to discuss a Plan B scenario and said a museum will certainly be built, one way or the other, or, I guess, in one place or another.

At least we probably need not worry that developers are going to snap up all the remaining available land at Fort Trumbull before the association sets its final course.

Some critics of the original move of the proposed site from Fort Trumbull to downtown have become more vocal lately, sensing, maybe, a chance to reverse course again, before it's too late.

I don't know much about big fundraising campaigns, but it does strike me that this one has been running kind of slowly. I'm more accustomed to campaigns in which a lot of money is raised before the effort even goes public.

It's a smaller scale, of course, but Mystic Seaport, for instance, had momentum toward breaking ground on their new exhibits building before ever announcing plans.

They also knew for sure, in announcing it, that it could be built where they proposed.

Pulver assured me fundraising is on track. The association has just added its fifth full-time person to the payroll, a development coordinator who works directly with the fundraising consultants hired by the association.

This employee was needed because there are so many leads to develop, he said.

Talks are under way with more than a dozen corporations, he said, and commitments being discussed could easily amount to more than the $7.5 million already raised.

"We are working really hard on all these things," he said. "It's full speed ahead."

I doubt there is a single person in the city who doesn't wish them success. I sure do.

This is the opinion of David Collins

d.collins@theday.com