Report: World Expo 2020 would drive $5.6 billion to Silicon Valley economy

As if hosting the largest gathering of people on the planet weren’t enough of an intriguing proposition, backers of a campaign to bring the 2020 world fair to Silicon Valley have come up with some estimates of the economic windfall that would gild the region during the six-month event — and the numbers are big.

Nearly $6 billion in overall economic activity. Twenty-five million visitors. Forty-two thousand jobs. And nearly $450 million in taxes to local and state coffers.

From fast-food meals to hotel rooms, from landscaping projects to millions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure improvements, the 2020 World Expo at Moffett Field would bestow a tantalizing blend of short- and long-term benefits upon the entire Bay Area, according to a report released this weekend from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute and Beacon Economics.

“Hosting the 2020 World Expo would put the Bay Area and Silicon Valley on the global stage in a very positive way,” said Bay Area Council President and CEO Jim Wunderman. “With its focus on innovation, sustainability and space science, the expo could help cement our reputation for good. Everybody will want what Silicon Valley’s got.”

Organizers say they think it would cost them $1 billion to plan and operate the expo. But the report, which was commissioned by the Bay Area Council and cost about $25,000 to compile, found that the increase in overall economic activity in the Bay Area in return could be on the order of $5.6 billion, four times the estimated impact of the Bay Area’s 2013 hosting of the America’s Cup ($1.4 billion).

The study’s authors insist the estimates are conservative. And Gordon Linden, an East Bay architect who has written extensively about the economic impact of world expos and has consulted with host cities, agreed.

“An expo can be a catalyst for doing big things with local infrastructure that takes years to do, so they do create a lot of jobs,” said Linden, who said the dollars and jobs figures were perfectly reasonable. “We did economic studies for a proposed San Francisco expo in 1995, and back then, we estimated 18 million people would come. So if you include the fact that many people will be repeat visitors in 2020, the 25 million number is in the ballpark.”

The year 2020, of course, is a way off. And the fledgling effort to put together a host bid, first floated last year by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, faces a long road filled with challenges of every size. An organizing committee must be put together, including local and state political figures, corporate leaders, as well as representatives from academia and trade unions. Detailed funding sources must be identified to cover the still-rough estimate of $1 billion organizers say they’ll need to plan for and operate the expo. Those could include everything from parking and licensing fees to food concessions and corporate sponsorships.

Typically held every five years, a world expo can bring tens of millions of visitors to see hundreds of pavilions, hosted by countries and individual corporations. Once described as a platform for “nation branding,” an expo can also cost a ton of money — the council said the Chinese government spent $4.2 billion on the Shanghai event, although much of that went to major improvements to the city’s highways and transit infrastructure.

“It’s really an intriguing idea, but there are a lot of questions that need a lot of answers,” said Mayor Melinda Hamilton of Sunnyvale, which borders Moffett Field, the former bayside naval air station decommissioned in 1994. “The devil is in the details, but an expo clearly has the potential to bring economic benefits to the area as well as accelerate improvements to and construction of major long-term infrastructure projects like the interchanges at Highway 101 near Moffett.”

Organizers plan to meet soon with other aspiring host cities, including Houston and Minneapolis, with the goal of getting them all to unite behind Silicon Valley because, as one official said, “we frankly have the best location of any bid city and the best chance of succeeding.”

Once that’s done, a blue-ribbon task force will be assembled, perhaps as early as next month. Bay Council members hope soon to start working with Gov. Jerry Brown’s office, as well as state and national political leaders and perhaps even a Hollywood movie star.

To host an expo, a region must be selected by the Paris-based Bureau of International Expositions, or BIE, through a competitive process much like the Olympics. But the United States must first rejoin that treaty organization, which it withdrew from several years ago.

Bay Area organizers say the U.S. State Department is exploring renewing its membership, and they hope to get a formal bid in by the end of the year. Next, BIE representatives would visit the Bay Area before the end of 2012. Finally, the group would choose a host city, somewhere in the world, probably in 2013 or 2014.

Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689. Follow him at Twitter.com/patmaymerc.