The $1.4 billion plan to replace the Richmond Coliseum and build new offices, hotels, retail stores and more than 2,800 apartments in 10 blocks near City Hall has been moved off the fast track.

The rush to get the project underway has ended, Mayor Levar M. Stoney disclosed in his first public comments on the grand plan to remake a section of Downtown north of Broad Street.

He said the proposal still is not ready to present to City Council and, at best, would not be until well after work is completed on the 2019-20 budget that begins July 1.

“It’s going to take more than four months” of additional legal work, and even then, there might not be a deal, the mayor indicated.

He offered the comments in response to a question about the planned Navy Hill project at the Feb. 28 Mayorathon, a review of the mayor’s first two years that Richmond Magazine and a host of Richmond area nonprofits staged at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art.

Among other things, Mayor Stoney said he wants to ensure that the proposal would be a revenue gusher that could in the next 30 years provide the city with huge increases in tax revenue over and above the cost of construction and debt repayment for a new 17,500-seat coliseum.

The city’s financial adviser suggested that the city could gain over three decades $1.1 billion in new revenue, excluding the new arena’s cost. That is a rosier outlook than even the Navy Hill group has projected.

“Our attorneys are at the table with the developers’ attorneys,” the mayor told the audience, and “if those returns were not to materialize — I don’t want that to be on the backs of city residents and taxpayers.

“In the past, we’ve rushed opportunities like this. I think we need to dot our ‘i’s and cross our ‘t’s this time,” he said.

Mayor Stoney’s current note of caution on the project pulls back from the enthusiasm with which he introduced the proposal in November on behalf of the Navy Hill development group that Dominion Energy’s top executive, Thomas F. “Tom” Farrell II, is leading.

Last year, the mayor believed the proposal was ready to roll and was beginning to lobby the council for support.

The mayor and his top administrators also had criticized the council for voting in December to create a citizen commission to review the proposal the mayor had hinted could be sent to City Council before Christmas, though that never happened.

At that time, Chief Administrative Officer Selena Cuffee-Glenn told the council that the city had spent more than a year carefully reviewing the proposal as she argued against a commission that she said could delay the start of the project.

In preparation, the city moved its homeless shelter to the Conrad Center in Shockoe Bottom and closed the Richmond Coliseum in early January, with project supporters expecting demolition to possibly begin this month. The Coliseum’s management contract is set to expire this month, according to the council.

Ms. Cuffee-Glenn joined the mayor in endorsing a City Council proposal to hire its own consultant to review the project proposal.

However, the administration has yet to provide any funding. The council has requested $150,000 be included in the 2019-20 budget, although the money would not be available until July 1.

SMG, which manages arenas in the United States and overseas, has run the city’s Coliseum since 2000 and has long had a Richmond partner, Johnson Marketing Inc.

City Hall has not issued any new requests for qualifications for a Coliseum manager, indicating that it has no immediate plans to reopen the existing arena.