When Penn State puts Circleville Farm up for sale again in late March, the request for proposals will require about 36 acres to be set aside for conservation on the 155-acre tract of land.

No matter which plan the university chooses, the buyer will have to preserve a Y-shaped, 200-foot-wide easement through the Ferguson Township property.

Penn State officials want to emphasize environmentally sound development of Circleville in a new request for proposals to be released on March 24, said Dan Sieminski, assistant vice president for finance and business.

Faculty members who reviewed the new document told administrators to better define the conservation easement, Sieminski said.

Meanwhile, a group of community members who favor conservation have asked the ClearWater Conservancy to watch over those 36 acres. Executive Director Jennifer Shuey said the question of where her group would join the process is still "up in the air," but added that the conservancy wants to be a player.

"Whoever would win this [request for proposals] -- I think that we'd at least be able to sit down at the table with them," Shuey said. "Our main goal is to make sure that the most environmentally sensitive features are conserved."

Circleville has been a locus of controversy since officials at the College of Agricultural Sciences decided they had run out of uses for the farmland, located about a mile west of campus.

Penn State's Board of Trustees scrapped an earlier request-for-proposals process, after complaints from the community.

Chris Uhl, a professor of biology who has led efforts to question the sale, said last week that he and other faculty still want to foster any internal proposals for alternative use of the land.

"They're in the business of buying and selling," Uhl said of Penn State administrators.

Faculty are more equipped to come up with a plan that might find a compromise between conservation and home development, he added.

Uhl said he and others planned to meet with administrators Tuesday, but Sieminski said that meeting did not happen. Penn State reopened Tuesday after being closed for a snow day.

Officials have not settled on how long they will give potential buyers to respond to the request for proposals, Sieminski said, but a 10-week window was mentioned last month.

Sieminski said the future of the Circleville land will ultimately be shaped by what happens in any rezoning process. The property is set aside for rural agricultural use, and any plan to include traditional homes would have to get approval from the township's zoning board.