Renaissance Square's problems ought to force a tough community dialogue, and I don't mean just about the role of partisan politics. In a recent interview, former Mayor Bill Johnson put his finger on a Ren Square angle that nobody's paid much attention to: the reluctance of this community's wealthiest citizens to help fund a performing arts center.

As best we can tell, the county has enough money to build a transit center and a new downtown campus for Monroe Community College. What it doesn't have is money for the arts center (now reduced to a single theater).

The arts are a major factor in Rochester's quality of life. They help industry, tech firms, and universities attract employees. Other communities have raised public and private money to build impressive arts centers. And in the past, that has happened here. Where are the George Eastmans of today?

Rochester doesn't lack wealthy people - people who could kick-start a major fundraising campaign for an arts center. But they've failed to step forward, right from the start.

Before Maggie Brooks conceived of Ren Square, there'd been years of studies and planning for a multi-theater performing arts center, to be located somewhere downtown. At one point, Midtown Plaza was chosen as the site, in the old McCurdy's space. Johnson and others appealed to Rochester's wealthiest people to make a major donation to get the fundraising started. "We came up empty-handed each time," he said.

It's a good bet that Ren Square's supporters have gone down the same road, with a similar result. Thus, we've put off construction of the MCC campus and the bus station.

"I think in 2009, unless something changes, we're going to be in the same position," Johnson said. "There is no private funding that is materializing for this project."

I don't like the way the performing arts center has degenerated into one theater. I like even less what all this says about support for the arts. We've witnessed yet another lost opportunity.

What now? Johnson talked sympathetically about the situation Brooks is in. "It's hard for an elected official to admit failure," he said. "I'm speaking from personal experience. We keep looking for every other alternative: ‘Let's go back to the drawing board.' But to stand up and say, ‘Folks, this isn't going to work'....

"Her best bet, in my opinion - and this is gratuitous, and certainly unsolicited - is to take the $150 million that she has locked up, and call Bob Duffy, and say: What's the best use of this money?"

"While she has control of this money, I think she needs to go and craft something," Johnson said. "You talk about out-of-the-box thinking: the community ought to be encouraging that. I think a group of civic-minded people can be convened to give solid input to our leaders about what is a community vision for that corner."

"Everybody's looking for the angle," said Johnson. "‘There must be some corruption here.' I don't think Maggie's corrupt. She depends on one base for her support. She's got to broaden it. She has an opportunity here, and Duffy has an opportunity here, to come up with something that could be very good for the community and bring this controversy to rest."

An amplification: A reader called to express his dismay about an omission from last week's article on the Arun Gandhi controversy. We quoted a few of the statements that Gandhi made in his Washington Post blog but didn't include this one: "We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players)...."

That statement, more than any of the others, is what has appalled Gandhi's critics, said the reader, and we should have included it. He's right.