A bid to host the World's Fair in Bloomington eight years from now is still alive, despite the failure of a critical step in Congress this week, Mark Ritchie said Tuesday.
Ritchie, the former Minnesota secretary of state who is spearheading the state's efforts to win a World's Fair, said he and others had hoped to see legislation allowing the U.S. State Department to spend federal dollars on a U.S. pavilion at the 2020 World Expo in Dubai. The pavilion was seen as a necessary step for the Minnesota host committee to pursue its 2027 bid.
The House Committee on Appropriations didn't include the measure in its end-of-year appropriations bill, despite the backing of Minnesota's entire congressional delegation and the Trump administration.
But it's still possible to move ahead with Minnesota's plan, Ritchie said, and funding for a pavilion could come about through another channel.
"It would have been great simply to have this fixed with one action of Congress, but Washington is very complicated and everything takes a very long time," he said.
The funding snag isn't specific to next year's Expo. It goes back to a federal law from the late 1990s that prohibits taxpayer dollars from being spent to build a U.S. pavilion at a World Expo. Since then U.S. participation has been sporadic and dependent on private donations.
The State Department said it would cost $60 million to build the pavilion.
World Expos are more commonly known in the United States as World's Fairs. The last World's Fair in the U.S. was in New Orleans in 1984. A decade later, Congress passed the law prohibiting the spending of federal dollars for a U.S. pavilion.
