The idea for a spanking new performing arts center downtown is tantalizing, but we shouldn’t deceive ourselves. Downtown is pulling its chair up to the table of a high-stakes poker game, where the hand it’s just been dealt carries more risk than a lot of us may realize.

And downtowners find themselves staring across the card table at Coliseum Director Matt Brown, who’s proven he can play winning hands against his opponents. As you will see, he’s the one who forced downtown to sit at the table and play this game in the first place.

The winner may wind up with a $40 million (or more) performing arts center. It will be built either downtown or at the coliseum complex on High Point Road. Or perhaps not at all.

So how did downtown’s leaders find themselves in this situation? It wasn’t just happenstance.

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Everyone agrees that the current facility, the decrepit War Memorial Auditorium at the coliseum complex, needs to be replaced. Downtown’s leaders for years have been pushing the idea of a performing arts center for the Elm Street neighborhood, mostly because downtown is centerstage for the city’s arts and culture. And a downtown center would likely result in more restaurants and shops in the center city, meaning more employment. The economic impact would be significant.

And in 2010 a performing arts center was listed as one of six major projects that should be undertaken for downtown. A task force began the legwork. But it slowly ground to a halt as the recession took hold and after voters elected a Tea Party-ish city council headed by a new mayor, ultra conservative Bill Knight. The new council was in no mood to spend money.

Had downtown’s leaders presented them with a proposal for a $30 million bond referendum for an arts center, their likely response would have been: "Are you kidding?" That’s what one top official told us.

So the plan was to ride out the recession and wait for a more forward-thinking city council. The council, of course, did turn over in November 2011, and most of the extreme conservatives are now gone. But the recession isn’t.

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Now comes Matt Brown. And here’s an important date: December 1, 2011.

The coliseum has for years been using revenue from a local hotel/motel tax to help pay off improvements and repairs made to the facility going back almost two decades. But on Dec. 1 the coliseum paid off that $56 million debt.

That left the millions of dollars in future hotel/motel tax revenues up for grabs. Only weeks later, in early January, Matt Brown was on Fox8 News, giving its reporter a tour of War Memorial, saying let’s replace it with a new performing arts center. And that’s just in time to switch over and continue pumping the motel/hotel tax revenues into the coliseum -- this time for a new performing arts center. He wants a $36 million bond issue to build it, along with $11 million in hotel/motel tax revenues.

It was a smart move on his part. With the coliseum debt retired, the city council might have been persuaded to designate the hotel/motel tax revenues elsewhere -- say to a performing arts center downtown. Matt Brown was first at the trough. Downtowners complained that he was stealing their performing arts center.

Mayor Robbie Perkins, despite being a longtime downtown supporter, for some reason goes on TV, saying Matt Brown has a plan and downtown doesn’t.

Robbie knows the term "throwing down the gauntlet."

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And that caught downtown leaders completely off guard, forcing them to jump headlong into this game to pursue a performing arts center, racing against the clock to have a bond referendum on the ballot for November. It was either that or give up the new facility to Matt Brown and the coliseum complex.

Within weeks, the council -- facing protests from downtown supporters -- decided to give the facility to downtown, at least for the time being.

So now, downtown and the city have only nine months to pull this off. They need twice that amount of time. They’ll be running up against one speedbump after another to find a location, obtain the property, undertake an economic impact study, get a facility on the drawing board, appease the dissenting players and get it on the ballot. And that’s not the hard part. Selling it to skeptical Greensboro voters will be. Even more time is needed for that.

If voters say no in November, it will have been the third unsuccessful attempt at convincing the public to shell out money for repairs or to replace the old auditorium. That could take the project off the table for years to come.

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So is Matt Brown out of the picture? Not hardly. The city has asked him to help design the facility and its seating. And he will manage it once built. If problems arise in this race to a November finish line, he could be there to shift the idea back to the coliseum. Don’t count him out.

Few people are willing to discuss that because no one downtown wants a confrontation with Matt Brown. That would divide the city and hurt chances for the bond referendum’s success.

As for the mayor, here’s a quote from him that was in Saturday’s News & Record: "I am not looking at this as something we are going to fail on. We are going to make it work."

The mayor may be right -- we hope so. We’ve long believed a performing arts center would be the single best project to pursue for downtown. But if he’s wrong, rushing into it like this could scuttle the arts center for the foreseeable future.

They say in poker that the biggest risk of all is never taking a risk, But there’s a difference between a "calculated risk" and "a gamble."

This is a high-risk gamble that downtown has been forced to play now -- and against its wishes.

Thursday: Six problems in getting a downtown performing arts center built.