Another big dream won first-round approval from the bobble-head quorum of the City Council last week.

Our dream du jour starts with a new, $32 million convention center to operate in conjunction with Civic Arena. The icing on this dream is a new, $16 million second hotel that could just spring from a converted American Electric building that also borders the arena.

This dream even comes with a funding plan. The city wants the state to approve what’s sometimes called a super-TIF — the Missouri Downtown Economic Stimulus Act — to capture state sales tax and income tax created downtown. Boosters figure the actual TIF package will come in at somewhere more than $40 million.

The dream also comes with a consultant, who assured five council members that the dynamics downtown now make this dream possible. The council members, with polite questioning at most, clung to those assurances long enough to kick this dream down the bureaucratic road to a similarly informal hearing with the community Tax Increment Financing Committee, which can be expected to afford these dreamers an equally polite hearing.

But some important questions do need answers before this dream comes up for a final vote. We will start with the convention center. Community leaders have kicked around the possibility of a convention center for a couple of decades or more. The original plan for Civic Arena, indeed, included the option of a convention center.

The rub is that such a center comes with little hope of ever finishing a year in the black. The last consultant to weigh in on this topic predicted a convention center on the city’s busier East Side would have a better chance of turning a profit, albeit that prospect still fell well short of a sure shot.

How much will taxpayers be expected to subsidize a Civic Arena and convention center that likely will both lose money?

As for this consultant’s suggestion that hotel occupancy rates are strong enough to make a second hotel downtown feasible, the present hotel also was built on optimistic projections. And taxpayers have more than once been forced to bail that hotel out of financial jams just to keep one hotel open downtown. Is there a limit to how much taxpayers will have to invest in downtown’s rebirth?

But taxpayers have a bigger question that needs to be answered: Is anyone setting priorities for this community?

While the downtown is pressing for this $40-million-plus shot in the arm via a convention center and a second hotel, Buchanan County officials are pushing for a $10-million-plus expo center/fairgrounds. The city, county and state are also collaborating on the $5 million (and climbing) Nature Center.

The $40-million-plus TIF for The Shoppes at North Village begot the $40-million-plus TIF for the East Hills Shopping Center. The St. Joseph School District wants voters to come up with more than $40-million-plus in new tax dollars to retool the district’s schools. Our cable channel, St. Joe Now, might want to start up the $40-million-plus “Jackpot Show,” in which community dreams compete for valuable TIF funding.

The city is also staring at a $500 million bill to fix up its sewer discharge into the river to the satisfaction of the feds. The council can pretend like this is part of its goal to improve the city’s sewer system. But this spending doesn’t pay a dime on the council’s goal of improving the existing system and expanding sewer lines into growth areas of the communities.

We could add to the list of dreams popping up around the community. Some city leaders still salivate for a new public safety tax. Seniors are on the clock for, of course, a new tax to help seniors’ programs. We could expand the list. But we won’t. Big dreaming is almost as popular today with community leaders as the iPod is with students.

And while we love dreams and admire dreamers, we also understand that it is easier to come up with a dream than it is to figure out a way to pay for it. TIFs are especially attractive now because there is a sense that they don’t involve real tax dollars. The community is only giving up tax dollars, after all, that it’s not getting now and wouldn’t get without the TIF improvement.

Still, the community is pinching off future revenue streams that the state was unwilling to give up when it created the TIF program to spur local economic development.

Our problem is not dreams. This community scores big when it comes to the next great vision. The challenge is setting priorities that will aim our pool of tax dollars at a strategy that will put Joetown on a growth path.

Some community leaders have quietly worried that the city’s last extension of its capital improvement tax, while wildly successful, aimed a more-than-healthy chunk of the new spending at projects in the first dozen or so blocks just east of the Missouri River that are also the areas least likely to grow in St. Joe.

There is hope. The old Community Plan, a mild disappointment at best, is reportedly reorganizing into what will be called the Community Alliance. Details are still a little sketchy. But if the goal is to get specific community leaders to sit down on a regular basis to set priorities for the community, the Alliance could work magic for the future of St. Joseph.

Mark Sheehan’s column runs on Sundays and Wednesdays.