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FOXBORO - When the New England Patriots battle the Miami Dolphins in a National Football League showdown Sunday, two entrenched forces will also collide off the field.

The Kraft Group and the town have staked out opposing positions on how many police details are needed to safely staff a game.

They also disagree on which agency - local or state police - should patrol the vast P-10 and P-11 Kraft-owned parking lots across Route 1 from the stadium.

While hopeful that an agreement can be reached, Selectman Paul Mortenson says the Battle of the Details is nowhere near winding down.

"They say they'll only pay for 126 (local detail officers)," Mortenson said. "If they don't pay, fine - pursuant to the licensing agreement, we go to arbitration or court." Both sides acknowledge that the Kraft Group has already withheld reimbursement payments to the town for disputed detail assignments for which the town has paid the officers who worked.

The board has accused the stadium of, in effect, grabbing no-interest loans from taxpayers through delinquent paybacks on details.

And Mortenson said the debt may deepen this weekend, when Police Chief Edward O'Leary follows his own detail plan, which selectmen have backed, instead of assigning the fewer officers the stadium's security chief insists on.

Stadium security chief Mark Briggs says O'Leary "has not wavered from the decision to provide seriously excessive police detail staff, dwarfing prior years of experience."

Briggs, like selectmen, expressed a wish for agreement, but "put the town on notice that we will not pay for unreasonable staffing levels."

He says the stadium will pay for no more than an average of 126 local police officers per game - slightly more than the 122 officers used in 2006.

Briggs said the police department's detail requirements exploded the following year, and continue to rise yearly.

O'Leary attributes his need for more officers to the number of liquor serving establishments at Patriot Place, the NFL's higher security requirements in an age of terrorism, increases in the amount of drinking in stadium lots, and the town's own fight against underaged drinking and other substance abuses.

Asked if he intends to stick to his new security plan, O'Leary said, "affirmative."

Selectmen Chairman Paul Feeney said Wednesday he's unsure which agency, the state or the local police, will staff the disputed P-10 and P-11 parking lot turf this Sunday or the rest of the season. "It is my understanding that state police have covered those lots for the majority of the events in the last couple of years, but the chief was working toward allocating local resources to staff and command P10 and P11 in the near future," Feeney said.

This summer, the stadium sought to have state police take over all the stadium parking lots, and to restrict local police to working inside the building.

Stadium management claimed O'Leary first agreed to the "walls-in, walls out" plan, then reneged, and is now pushing state police, who are paid less per hour than local police for details at the stadium, out of the two big lots across Route 1.

Selectman Larry Harrington, while agreeing to the board's strong support for O'Leary, has been critical of the town's position on several fronts.

"Details are a huge cost to the Patriots, especially with the contract signed by the last board giving the police a huge raise on weekend details and making them much more expensive than state police," he said. "I do not think this was fair and don't blame Patriots for being unhappy with that but I can't change that."