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BLACKSBURG -- The four town council members who voted for a new Blacksburg High School stadium on Tuesday simultaneously handed county and town officials another big challenge: deciding the future of the old Blacksburg Middle School.

To start that process, Montgomery County Supervisors and council have appointed a joint task force.

A meeting date has not yet been set. But when it is, one of the first orders of business may be clearing the air.

Council members said they were disappointed or frustrated by what they see as a general lack of cooperation from county officials, who proposed without town council input to build a new stadium along Prices Fork Road. The high school's aging stadium is now located at the old middle school.

Councilman Tom Sherman has bristled at suggestions from the school board that the stadium might be moved outside town limits if the town denied the county's stadium proposal.

Blacksburg residents who opposed the new stadium have also criticized county officials over the apparent ultimatum.

Terrie Cohill told council on Tuesday that it amounted to bullying, "and we don't allow bullying in the Montgomery County schools."

School board member Wat Hopkins, who wrote a newspaper commentary suggesting the stadium might be moved outside town, said Wednesday that he was surprised at the negative reactions.

"It was not intended to be a threat or strong-arming," Hopkins said.

He said the piece wasn't aimed at council. It was meant to explain to town residents the options before council. "I wrote the commentary to explain things to other people so they would see the importance of the upcoming vote."

Hopkins expressed his own frustrations with seeming mixed messages from town officials.

On the one hand, council members were upset that they weren't included in the initial planning for the stadium.

On the other hand, Sherman criticized school officials Tuesday for failing to plan for construction of the new Blacksburg High School.

School officials have said they want to build a new high school near the Prices Fork stadium sometime in the next 10 to 20 years. But their stadium proposal included few details about the new school.

Overall though, Hopkins was upbeat about the stadium vote and about forming better relations.

Councilman Paul Lancaster, who voted for the stadium, said he thought the school board had made a string of bad decisions, beginning with moving the middle school from South Main Street to Prices Fork Road in 2002.

Others, including Councilman Don Langrehr, have expressed disappointment in the lack of dialogue between the supervisors and council.

Addressing some of those concerns, Supervisor Mary Biggs said county officials didn't realize until late into the stadium process how alienated the council felt.

But now that the stadium vote is over, Biggs said she believed the boards "have a clean slate and we're ready to roll" with plans for the old middle school.

The old middle school sits on 20 acres of prime downtown Blacksburg real estate on South Main Street.

Council may also have to atone for some resentment it has caused.

Members of the school board, which owns the old school property, were chagrined to find out in 2004 that council had held confidential discussions with a Virginia Beach developer about building a mall there.

Relations did not improve over the course of the May council election, when criticism of the county's stadium plan became a shared campaign platform between all eight candidates.

Lancaster, who will sit on the middle school task force, said he thinks all officials learned something in this process, especially about the importance of better communication.

"So I think we're going to do all right in terms of what will happen in the future," he said.

Other school building needs stand in the way of a plan to redevelop the old middle school site, however.

County supervisors must come up either with a site for a new Prices Fork Elementary School or a place to put those students during renovations.

That, along with a new Blacksburg stadium, were conditions established by the school board in 2004 for turning over the property for development.

Supervisors hope the eventual sale of the old middle school site will net $4 million to $10 million for new school buildings.