Expo 2023 is a prize worth seeking for Minnesota

For Minnesota boosters, these are heady times. This year brought Major League Baseball's All-Star Game to Target Field. A Super Bowl is on its way to the new Vikings stadium in 2018; an NCAA Final Four basketball tournament is due a year later.

Will a scaled-down type of World's Fair be next, in 2023?

Even to the Star Tribune Editorial Board's ardent Minnesota promoters, the idea of hosting Expo 2023 — a smaller, three-month version of the World's Fairs staged every five years — seemed far-fetched at first. But with imaginations fired by the expo's working theme, "Healthy People, Healthy Planet: Wellness and Well-Being for All," the prospect is gaining plausibility and enthusiasm.

That sense was intensified last week by word that Washington-based Nature Conservancy chief operating officer Lois Quam, who also has executive service at UnitedHealth Group and the U.S. State Department to her credit, has signed on as the Minnesota bid's national co-chair.

"I think bringing this fair to Minnesota is very important," Quam said. "The more I've traveled, the more I recognize how special Minnesota is. Minnesota has something to offer and demonstrate to the world about striving to be the best and working hard to find new ways to do better."

Quam joins a top-flight advisory committee led by Mark Ritchie, soon to be Minnesota's former secretary of state, that is preparing a bid for presentation next June to the Bureau of International Expositions in Paris. Minnesotans of stature and experience are on board, including three honorary co-chairs, former Vice President Walter Mondale, former Gov. Arne Carlson and Carlson Co. former chair Marilyn Carlson Nelson. Corporate backers include Ecolab and Hubbard Broadcasting. The public relations wizards at Tunheim who prepared Minnesota's successful Super Bowl bid are working on this assignment, as are business planners at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.

The assignment has a peculiar twist. It must overcome the fact that the United States is not now eligible to host either a world's fair, which occur at the start and the middle of each decade, or an expo, staged between fairs. That's because in 2001, the United States withdrew from the 168-nation bureau that organizes these events. This country has not hosted a fair or expo since New Orleans was the site of the Louisiana World Exposition in 1984.

Also, fortunately for Minnesota, it is to date the world's only prospective bidder for Expo 2023. Other early contenders have dropped out. Rumored competition from Lodz, Poland, didn't materialize at last week's bureau meeting in Paris, where considerable interest was expressed in Minnesota's emerging bid. The 2023 site will be announced in June 2016, a year after the official pitch is made. (To learn more, go to expo2323.info.)

This is a prize well worth pursuing, and not just because of the estimated 12 million visitors and $4 billion in foreign tourism spending that Expo 2023 is projected to bring to Minnesota between mid-May and mid-August that year. Expos are international showcases for innovation — in this case, focusing on one of Minnesota's signature industries. This state has much to show and much to gain from the exchange of ideas that the exposition will feature.

A Minnesota Expo also would likely boost investment in infrastructure that would serve this state long after 2023. A glimmer in planners' eyes is a privately financed high-speed rail link between Rochester and the Twin Cities. A new venue for events near the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is a strong possibility.

Planners say they will rely on private financing and volunteer support to pull off Expo 2023, though they say they are grateful for supportive comments from both outgoing DFL House Speaker Paul Thissen and incoming GOP Speaker Kurt Daudt. Other elected officials would do well to learn about the bid. Some of the infrastructure improvements that would enhance an Expo would seem to be the public sector's rightful responsibility.