The rumor has been circulating for months that the county plans to dump a crucial part of Renaissance Square, the performing arts center, and do only the bus station and a new campus for Monroe Community College.

Now Democrat and Chronicle reporter Joe Spector has brought the rumor out into the open. And he asked Mayor Bob Duffy what he thought.

And the mayor said that if the performing arts center isn't part of Ren Square, he'll withdraw his support.

It's high time somebody said that.

County Exec Maggie Brooks told Spector that the arts center is still very much a part of the Ren Square plan. We just might have to build it later. When we get the money for it. Ren Square might have to be built in "stages," with the MCC facility and the bus station done first.

Enough's enough. We've already reduced the performing arts center from three theaters to two. Or maybe one: the only certainty has seemed to be a large theater for the Rochester Broadway Theater League's touring shows. That would be a "performing arts center" in name only. Performance space for the region's important music, theater, and dance groups was eliminated.

And now the big theater will be built, oh, sometime in the future. When the money is raised. And it'll be, oh, whatever size we raise enough money for.

This is beyond absurd.

I wouldn't suggest for a minute that we build a theater that we can't afford. But if there was no money for a performing arts center, why did we keep the arts center in the Ren Square plans?

Jaded critics of the Brooks administration will say it was kept there to make Ren Square palatable. It would have been hard to get anybody excited about building a bus station on Main Street and moving MCC's downtown classes out of one building and into another.

Throw in an "arts center," and the thing sounds sexy.

Brooks' supporters will say that there was every intention to include the theater, but the arts groups couldn't agree on what they wanted. And that the Upstate economy is sluggish, so fundraising's tough.

Frankly, it doesn't matter who's right. What matters is what we're going to get.

What is Ren Square?

From the outset, it's been almost impossible to get information about this project. And I mean from the outset: back before Maggie Brooks' Ren Square vision, when then-Mayor Bill Johnson and then-County Executive Jack Doyle appointed a big committee to plan a performing arts center.

Committee meetings were closed to the public and the press, and committee members were ordered to keep their mouths shut or be kicked out of the group.

That committee was succeeded by a smaller one composed of two city officials, two county officials, and a Wegmans attorney. Their actions, too, were secret.

Then, in 2003, as the Republican-led transit authority ramped up plans for a downtown bus station, the arts center morphed into Ren Square: one piece for a new MCC facility, one piece for the bus station, and one for the arts center.

In 2005, big-name architect Moshe Safdie was hired to design Ren Square. Safdie's plan was beautiful, innovative, and worthy of a facility named Renaissance Square. And the arts center was a big piece of it.

Now we have the rumors: there'll be no theater in Ren Square.

It is time for answers. To lots of questions.

The first question is this: Will Ren Square be built with a theater in it right from the get-go?

If the answer is no, the county executive must say so. And she must say so now.

Talk of "stages" is not good enough. If the theater will come later, if the theater will come only when money is raised, if the theater's size is dependent on the amount of money raised, we're planning a dramatically different project. And the county executive needs to be frank about that.

Brooks also needs to be frank about what the change means to Ren Square's design. The components of Safdie's plan were highly connected. That was one of the beauties of it. A public atrium would link MCC, the theater, and the bus station. MCC studios would look out over the atrium. A second-level bridge would connect the two sides of the complex. Theater-goers would spill out into the atrium. There would be restaurants and small retail shops.

If there'll be no theater at the beginning, what will this thing look like? What will Safdie's connections connect to? What will replace the theater? A blank wall?

Has Safdie been asked to create a plan that omits the theater in some undetermined "first stage"?

And just how long will this first stage be? When will Ren Square be what we were told it would be?

And do we want Ren Square if there's no theater?

One person who says no to that last question: Mayor Bob Duffy.

"‘Stages,'" Duffy spokesperson Gary Walker said on Friday, "are not acceptable."

The entire complex "would have to be built concurrently," said Walker. "The performing arts center would have to be part of the structure."

"If there's no money for the arts center," said Walker, "then there's no money for the project. When we came into office, that was the project. Now you're saying we're going to do only two-thirds of it?"

The hope had been that Ren Square, with the arts center, would "turn Main and Clinton around," said Walker.

"What's Renaissance Square about if we take the theater out?" asked Walker.

"Why would you have a Moshe Safdie-designed bus station?"

The Ren Square site is one of the most important pieces of real estate in Monroe County. If somebody had proposed tearing down much of that block on Main Street and replacing it with a bus station and part of an MCC complex, would there have been public support?

If that's what we're talking about - at least in the "first stage" - the mayor will oppose it, Walker said.

And so, I'll bet, will City Council, which will have to approve giving up city property - Mortimer Street and the Mortimer Street garage site - for Ren Square.

And I'd bet there'll be objections from Rochester's representatives in Washington, who could have some influence over federal funds.

Downtown Rochester is a crucial part of the city, and city officials, not county officials or the transit authority, are in charge of deciding what can go where.

"That's a big footprint of our downtown," said Walker. "There are other places in the city or downtown we could put a bus station or a community college."

Would the city go so far as to refuse to turn over Mortimer Street and the Mortimer garage? The county and the transit authority could argue that their eminent-domain rights trump the city's, and that would almost certainly lead to a court battle.

"That's the kind of stuff we don't want to get into," Walker said, and the Duffy administration hopes to be able to settle things amicably. "We are going to be having a sit-down with the mayor and the county executive to get some assurances about the nature of this project. If the mayor of the city of Rochester doesn't know the details, that's not acceptable."

"It's not our goal to scuttle the project," said Walker. "It's our goal to get some assurances."

Everybody needs some assurances, and some straight talk. Ren Square will be enormously expensive, and officials have been dodging way too many questions for too many years.

This newspaper has repeatedly asked who would operate Ren Square and what the operating costs would be. It's a good bet that those costs will be high, and the public will be responsible.

Now, there are more questions:

How much of Ren Square will be Safdie's design?

Will the public get to see the completed plan before the county starts demolishing buildings on the Ren Square site?

Ren Square's project manager, Mark Ballerstein, said two years ago that perhaps as much as a third of the cost of the arts center would have to come from private donations. Are we now expecting the full cost to be privately funded?

Who's in charge of raising that private money? What's the goal, and how much has been raised? When did the fund-raising campaign start? Why has there been no public fund-raising announcement, no public appeal?

Maybe when Mayor Duffy has his sit-down with the county executive, he can get answers to these questions.

We'll be happy to publish them.