Sometimes it feels like there's a tug-of-war between different visions for Rochester. One side is parochial, with aspirations no grander than keeping taxes low. The other side was in full bloom last week at the Jazz Festival: tens of thousands of people filling the streets and every venue, night after night after night.

That's the side that offers hope for this region. And it is no small thing that festival audiences treated promoter John Nugent like a rock star, cheering him every time he walked onto a stage to introduce an act - and giving him a loud, standing ovation when he walked out onto the Kilbourn stage to introduce Joe Lovano on the festival's final night.

That was not a mirage. And the Jazz Festival's wild success is not a fluke. This is Rochester. It's what it is now, and it points to what it can become.

Which brings me to Renaissance Square.

Sometime soon, perhaps as early as July 14, City Council must start making some of its toughest, most important decisions in decades. It has to vote on letting Ren Square take private property at Main and Clinton - the site of the Ren Square theater - through eminent domain. Not long afterward, it must decide whether to give up a piece of vacant land and a couple of streets for the MCC and bus station components.

Theoretically, Council could kill the project by voting against all of those changes. I don't think that's likely. Council members seem very concerned about the feasibility of the theater, but they like having a new downtown campus for Monroe Community College. And while some of them aren't enamored of the size of the bus station, most seem to want to provide a warm place for bus riders to wait.

They also don't want to be responsible for losing the millions of dollars of federal aid that have been promised for the project. But that doesn't mean Council has no power right now. It can, and should, insist on fiscal prudence. It should get more conservative estimates on what it will cost to operate all three facilities. It should demand to know exactly where that money will come from: how much taxpayers are likely to have to contribute.

And City Council should insist on a much better design for the project.

The money: The revenue and expense estimates for both the bus station and the theater are squishy - optimistic in the very way that the expense and revenue projections for the ferry were. City Council and the mayor should do their own analysis of the Ren Square finances - and make them public.

The theater, whose operator and principal tenant will be the Rochester Broadway Theatre League, is expected to have an annual operating deficit of about $1.5 million. How will that $1.5 million be paid for? Ren Square officials' answer: through naming rights, annual fundraising, new conventions, increased ticket prices, sponsorships. There are no guarantees with any of those, to put it mildly.

In our June 10 interview with her, County Executive Maggie Brooks continued to insist that taxpayers won't be left holding the bag. Ren Square officials have said that the revenue projections are based on the experience of theaters in similar markets. But taxpayers got the same pledge about Frontier Field and the soccer stadium. County government subsidizes Frontier Field every year. And early promises to the contrary, construction of the soccer stadium was paid for almost entirely by taxpayers. Paetec's initial naming-rights pledge has expired, and the stadium's owners are trying to find new donors. And this year city taxpayers will provide a $420,000 subsidy for the soccer stadium because its owners are losing money.

As it looks for additional donors - to build its theater and, then, to operate it - RBTL will be in competition with other important local arts institutions, many of whom already find it hard to balance their budget. Garth Fagan, for example, is facing a $300,000 budget deficit this year.

In our June 10 interview, Brooks warned that RBTL "will literally be out of business within five to 10 years" if it doesn't get a new, bigger theater. But what if RBTL can't pay the additional operating costs of a new theater and goes out of business? We'll have a big, expensive, empty building on prime downtown real estate.

As for the MCC campus and the bus station: I haven't seen figures for MCC, but the deficit for the bus stations is pegged at $2 million a year. Brooks and other Ren Square officials insist that both the college and the transit company can afford these new facilities and their new, big operating expenses. How? They'll get money from Albany, we're told, as if "Albany" were a magnanimous, public-spirited corporation. It doesn't make me feel much better knowing that the extra expense will come out of my state taxes rather than my local taxes.

You could argue, I guess, that if MCC and the transit company came up short, it wouldn't be City Council's problem. But that ignores a couple of things.

1) Monroe County government has already initiated a "charge-back" system, assessing city taxpayers for part of the expense of city residents who attend the college. There's no guarantee that the county won't up the charge or find some other way to get city taxpayers to help finance the operating deficit of this new downtown campus.

2) As Ren Square officials like to point out, many of the people who ride RTS buses are city residents with low incomes. If there's a deficit and the state and federal government won't pick up the tab, will RGRTA raise the bus fares?

The design: As the plans stand now, on Main Street we will have what looks like a nice but rather ordinary building housing MCC, retail and restaurants, transit authority offices, and a public area leading back to the bus station. To the west will be a small park. To the east: an empty lot that might be the site of a theater.

The bus station itself, on Ren Square's northern edge, will be a nearly block-long, brick-faced, concrete building of - how can I put this politely -pedestrian, utilitarian design. Passengers will wait in the center. Along the sides, buses will pull in, pick up passengers, and pull out.

Portions of the roof will be open, for natural ventilation of the exhaust fumes (and, of course, noise) from the buses. In fairness, I should note that the Environmental Assessment for the project studied both noise and emissions; neither was found to have any impact.

But no one in the city or the suburbs would want this next door to their home. And yet it will be just a few feet from two important, historic buildings, one of which now houses apartments and another that is being renovated for that use.

City Council should insist that the building on Main Street be architecturally significant, not simply a pedestrian office structure. And Council should insist that the bus station be dramatically redesigned: scaled down, enclosed, and attractive.

Yes, that will cost money. Where could it come from? From state and federal funds that have already been secured and are currently designated for the theater. By my calculation, nearly $24 million of the state and federal funds that Ren Square has raised is headed for the theater. Some of that could be used to improve the design of the other two components.

If we don't build the theater - certainly a possibility - presumably we'll lose that money. We ought to put it where it will be used, and used for a good purpose - to add distinction to the new building on Main Street, and to make the bus station more compatible with its residential surroundings.

That shouldn't kill the possibility of the theater. City Council and the mayor should offer, in return, a compromise: If Ren Square officials agree to redesign the bus station and MCC segments, City Hall should agree to lobby Democratic officials in Albany for additional funding for the theater, with three conditions:

1) That city officials are satisfied that the theater will have a distinctive architectural design;

2) That RBTL and Ren Square officials are able to raise a significant amount of private funding for its construction;

3) That city officials are satisfied that the public won't become responsible for subsidizing the operating costs for the theater - or for MCC or the bus station.

Meantime, there's the issue of eminent domain. Ren Square officials want to take the privately owned Main and Clinton properties quickly and tear them down. City Council should do two things:

1) It should delay voting on eminent domain for a few weeks to determine what the private-development potential is for that site: with the current buildings standing, and with the properties cleared and made shovel ready.

City Hall should ask a group of developers, architects, and engineers to assess the development potential. Some of them should be selected by the Landmark Society, to insure that the group includes people with experience and interest in rehabilitation of deteriorated historic buildings.

2) If developers, engineers, and architects agree that the buildings can not be saved, City Council should agree to the eminent-domain request to let the properties be cleared while federal funds are available to pay for it. But Council should also insist that Ren Square turn over those properties to the city within a specified time - two years? - if funding hasn't been secured for a theater.

The Main and Clinton properties are key pieces of downtown real estate. Things have changed since Ren Square was first conceived. Private development continues to grow downtown. It is simply unreasonable to insist that this parcel can't be rethought.

Ren Square officials portray the project as the salvation for downtown Rochester: the biggest and best thing that has ever happened to us. With all due respect, it isn't. And it could be a much better project than its planners currently envision.

I was struck by a recent New York Times article on the design for a new building in Brooklyn. Internationally known architect Frank Gehry had designed a unique solution to a difficult problem: building a massive sports arena in an important city neighborhood. But the developer, worried about the cost, dropped Gehry's design and hired a firm that has substituted, in writer Nicolai Ouroussoff's words, "a colossal, spiritless box."

"What's most important," wrote Ouroussoff, "is to build, no matter how thoughtless or dehumanizing the results. It is the kind of logic that kills cities - and that has been poisoning this one for decades."

I wouldn't argue that the design for Ren Square's Main Street building is "spiritless" or "dehumanizing" (though that's a pretty good word for the bus-station design). But for a brief while, we had a better project. Now, Ren Square is driven less by good city planning principles than by federal dollars and construction jobs.

If we must have Ren Square where it's planned, let us at least have a terrific design.

Let us have a Ren Square we can be proud of.