The county hopes to begin demolishing buildings at the Renaissance Square site in late summer or early fall, and the city has already begun to dismantle the Mortimer Street garage there. But some important issues haven't been settled, including what the operating costs will be and who will pay for them.

Also potentially in flux: when the two Ren Square theaters will be built. Mark Ballerstein, the county's point person on the project, said last week that the estimated cost for the two theaters is $100 million, and that only about $30-$35 million has been secured. The rest would have to be raised from public and private sources. What happens if that money can't be raised? In the worst case, he said, the theater portion of the complex would be built later.

Environmental reviews are being conducted, Ballerstein said, and the county hopes to have site preparation completed by February or March 2008. A decision on the theaters would need to be made early next spring, he said.

Funding has been assured for the two other parts of the project --- the $54 million Monroe Community College facility and the bus terminal --- Ballerstein said.

Plans call for the county to own the MCC space and for the transit authority to own the space occupied by the bus station. The college will lease space above the transit center concourse, Ballerstein said.

A committee is ironing out details such as security, utilities, and janitorial services, Flynn said. The costs for those services would likely be shared by the different entities, Ballerstein said.

Plans for the bus terminal are well under way, Ballerstein said, but of the three projects, "MCC has a better vision of what they're going to have in the end."

"The city campus is going to be the anchor of the Renaissance Square program," MCC President Thomas Flynn said in an interview last week.

MCC will move its Damon City Campus out of the Sibley building and into Renaissance Square. Early public discussions about Ren Square referred to the MCC facility as a "tech center," suggesting that its academic focus might include technology. But the term was a reference to how technology might be implemented in the campus, a county spokesperson says. The new facility --- located in the Granite Building and in new space now occupied by the former Edwards buildings --- will be primarily the new home of MCC programs that are now in the Sibley building.

MCC also plans to move its theater program from its Brighton campus to the new city facility, to take advantage of the theaters planned for Ren Square. That's a smart move, says Heidi Zimmer-Meyer, president of Rochester Downtown Development Corporation. The performance facility, she says, would provide a great opportunity for students to learn about the back-end operations of a theater.

The Damon campus has been in operation for about 15 years and is the home of MCC's law enforcement and human-services programs, as well as some liberal arts programs.

Flynn thinks it's likely that the new facility will draw more suburban students downtown. At present, 50 percent of the students at the Damon campus live in the city, according to the college.

Although she concedes that there are some unanswered questions, Zimmer-Meyer says the question is no longer whether Renaissance Square will be built. RDDC's focus now, she says, is how to best leverage the opportunities created by Ren Square.

The MCC campus, she says, will be a key component. It could stimulate development along Main Street, she says, and student housing, especially, is a possibility.

"Main Street is our last bastion of underdevelopment in downtown," says Zimmer-Meyer.

The large theater could give Rochester the capability to attract a new kind of convention crowd: groups that need a facility with auditorium seating.

While plans move ahead for Renaissance Square, however, the future is still uncertain for Midtown Plaza and the Sibley Building. Government and business leaders hope that Ren Square will spur interest in both of those sites. In the short term, though, the development will be both a positive and a negative. Moving the MCC campus out of the Sibley building creates more empty space in an already struggling part of downtown, sort of the opposite of a renaissance.