City residents got some good news late last month: a film production company and Nothnagle Realtors are moving into downtown. Neither will add a huge number to the city's workforce, but still: two more businesses have professed their faith in downtown and want to bring their people here.

I'm finding more than a little black humor in the news, though.

The film company - Fifth Year Productions - is moving into the Granite Building at Main and St. Paul, at one time the headquarters of the Harris Beach law firm. Years ago, some preservation-minded downtown enthusiasts at Harris Beach convinced the firm to save and renovate that building. More recently, though, other Harris Beach partners decided that downtown was too seedy and that the suburbs were more convenient. (For them, at least; I don't find it convenient when I have to drive out there to see my lawyer). So Harris Beach sought, and got, a nice tax break to rehab and move into a building out in Perinton.

Now, we're going to give some public money to Fifth Year Productions to help it create its space on the first floor of the Granite Building.

And a few blocks west on Main Street, we'll give some public funds to Nothnagle so it can move its headquarters from Brighton into the city.

I'm celebrating both developments. For years, city residents have watched as businesses moved out to the suburbs, often with the help of tax breaks. We grow weary of the smearing and stereotyping from people who haven't set foot in downtown in a quarter-century.

And while I haven't completely made up my mind about what's left of the Ren Square plan, I do get a bit bristly at the patronizing from Ren Square officials who suggest that city leaders have let downtown deteriorate and that Ren Square is going to save Main Street. Sorry, but LOL.

The current city administration, like the previous two, is coping with the enormous burden that sprawl has caused as the city's tax base declined and the demand for services increased. Through it all, those administrations - Ryan, Johnson, and Duffy - fought, often successfully, for new, private development in downtown Rochester. Some of it has been big: the Hyatt Hotel, the Bausch and Lomb Building, the ESL building going up, the promise of a Paetec headquarters. Some has been more modest, like the Nothnagle move.

The development has been slow, so slow that many people may not realize it has happened. But it is indisputable that we've seen impressive, positive changes downtown over the past couple of decades. New housing. New businesses. New nightclubs. New restaurants. Expansion of major arts institutions.

Downtown is not dead.

So I'm celebrating the latest news. And I'm not going to fuss about the tax breaks.

But I am going to point out something to all of the folks who gripe about high taxes in New York State. When we give tax breaks to encourage businesses to move into the city, into Brighton, into Pittsford or Greece, the rest of us have to make up for that loss. Things like the county's Industrial Development Agency and Empire Zones may have been well intentioned, but the result hasn't been a lot of new business and industry coming in from outside the region. It's been one town luring businesses from another. Perinton financing a law firm moving out of the city. The city luring a business from the Town of Brighton.

And also, by the way: If we had some kind of rational, regional land-use planning, this kind of thing wouldn't be happening. We wouldn't be competing with one another, as the city and the suburbs try to boost their tax base. And we wouldn't be viewing a bus station as a major downtown revitalization project.