A local developer with a proven track record in downtown redevelopment wants to take on the monumental challenge of reshaping the former AM&A’s department store. We wish him luck. Somebody has to get this job done.

Rocco Termini already has begun a commendable conversion of three former AM&A’s warehouse buildings behind the store into apartments and office space. Tackling the deteriorating Main Street structure that anchors the complex is even more commendable—provided it doesn’t prove an exorbitant effort for taxpayers.

Termini is up-front about that. He’s looking for an estimated $80 million to $100 million in public help. Whether he should get that much depends a lot on how the aid would be structured—and whether it’s more costly to provide some historic rehabilitation tax credits for improvement of a building that is central to downtown, to keep what’s there on the tax rolls while it continues to rot, or to take an even steeper but temporary drop in property taxes by removing the building and starting over.

Given the years-long lack of progress on this critically important site, government may have to extend itself beyond the norm for such projects. But the correct answer to Termini’s request for public help should center on whether doing so would be too much of a burden to taxpayers. He already has obtained from the State Office of Historic Preservation a designation of the AM&A’s buildings as a historic district, opening a path to tax incentives.

While preservationists will be heartened by Termini’s efforts to preserve old portions of the building, both the original storefronts buried within the structure and the aging department- store facade have been neglected for years and have drawn fire-safety complaints from the city. Last month, a downtown banking leader said the buildings’ downstate owners should be jailed if they did not make repairs.

Careful incorporation of any surviving original design elements of the structures could be a bonus, if possible, but the overriding need is new use for an old site. As renowned English architectural historian Reyner Banham once noted, “If we let the paranoid preservers maneuver us into keeping everything, we shall bring the normal life-process of decay and replacement to a halt, we shall straitjacket ourselves in embalmed cities of the past.”

Termini is the best hope yet to complete what should be the highest-priority downtown-core redevelopment project for Buffalo. Through his Signature Development Buffalo LLC firm, he started work a month ago on an $11 million phase to turn three of the four former AM&A’s warehouse buildings at 369 Washington St. into 65,000 square feet of residential and commercial space. Not only does he plan on being finished with the project next March or April, but he also figures on it being fully occupied the first day. And why not?

Downtown living is surging and Termini should know, after developing the IS Lofts, Ellicott Lofts, Ellicott Commons, Oak School, Webb Lofts and Oak Street Apartments.

So far, he’s been the only one of numerous “visionaries” to make anything happen at AM&A’s. He now wants to negotiate with New Horizons Acquisitions LLC—which bought the buildings in September 2006 for $2.05 million but has done nothing with them—to buy the Main Street store.

The timing feels right. Main Street is in for a face lift as work continues to return vehicle traffic, and Termini’s current work on the AM&A’s warehouse conversion already has a waiting list. People populate planned downtown housing whenever the opportunity arises. An AM&A’s store conversion, locally run, would be a continuation of that promise.