Wading through
By : Juliet D. Golden
After an initial, cautious phase of testing waters and leaking information sparingly, Wroclaw has decided to toss its name in the hat to host the World Expo 2009.
While public debate on news of the bid is only beginning, the first signals from residents and business circles in Wroclaw are positive.
"I would love it if they did it," said Henry McGovern, president of AmRest, which runs the KFC and Pizza Hut franchise in Poland. "I think it would put the city on the map."
But in a city where citizens put up with dense, slow-moving traffic to get to and from work and where the A4 highway to the German border dates back to the Nazi-era, others are more restrained in their approbation of the latest announcement coming out of city hall. With a potential price tag of upward of $10 billion, many said that Wroclaw has a long way to go before it's ready to host the 40 million fairgoers Expo would attract.
"I'm positive, but at the moment (I think that) Wroclaw hasn't got this potential, neither the existing infrastructure, nor the financial strength" to pull off Expo, said Jerzy Hendrich, director of Commercial Property Services. "If we look back at the cities that used to organize the Expo, they are much richer cities."
Realistic or not, the Expo idea has sparked the imagination in Wroclaw and the region. Not only does Expo give Wroclaw a chance to be placed on the international map, it spares the city expulsion to the oblivion of a third-tier provincial town.
"This is a play for the position of the city in Poland," said Grzegorz Roman, a board member of the Wroclaw voivodship and who until recently headed the city's development office. "This is a chance for Wroclaw to become the second city in Poland. You can't race with Warsaw, you can pass Poznan, eliminate Gdansk and Lodz. It's a problem of Krakow-Wroclaw."
The Hanover experience
This ulterior motive as a driving force behind a city's candidature is not something that surprises Dagmar Morcinek, assistant to the general commissioner of the Hanover Expo, the host of the 2000 fair. Morcinek has been involved in planning the event for the past 10 years.
But like Morcinek from Hanover and the organizers of Zakopane's failed bid to host the 2006 Winter Olympics know, motivation and sound local reasoning are not enough to put together a winning bid. "It's a very hard road," Morcinek said.
The first barrier Hanover had to overcome was gaining the right kind of support on a national level, she said. While the city is the initiator of the event, Morcinek stressed that the federal government has to be won over to make the bid a success.
"The organizer must be the state," Morcinek said. "It must be Germany, it must be France, it must be Poland, who is the host."
"But that doesn't indicate that the federal organization takes all the risks," she added.
The risks involved are largely financial in nature. Before starting the organizational work on the Expo, for seven years from 1987 to 1994 Hanover and national authorities and business leaders hammered out a deal that would secure financing of the event and spread the risk across the board.
"The financing of a world exposition is not so very easy," Morcinek said.
The construct that the Hanover came up with involved setting up a private investment company in which 40% of shares were held by the Federal Republic of Germany, 30% by the state of Lower Saxony, 20% by the national chamber of commerce and 10% by the town and region of Hanover.
The next battle is on the international front. Before Hanover was selected by the country members of the International Bureau of Expositions, it had to compete with Toronto and Venice for top spot.
Despite the fact that Venice pulled out on the eve of the final vote, winning was not easy for Hanover. Up to the last vote cast, the fate of the German city's candidature was not clear. The final vote was made in June 1990, prior to the re-unification of the two Germany's. With the final count of 21-20 in Hanover's favor, East Germany is thought to have probably pushed West Germany's bid across the finish line. "It's a bit of a historic joke," Morcinek said.
The biggest hurdle to overcome is not getting the international votes to tally in a city's favor, but answering hard questions in the host city itself about whether or not it has the accommodations and infrastructure in place to welcome so many people.
"Do you have an area that is fit for a world exposition? Who builds those buildings? Who pays for those buildings? In the modern world everybody wants to go to those events by car, do you have enough room to park them?" Morcinek said.
Call of God and nature
These are big hurdles on Wroclaw's path to being an Expo host. But the city has made great leaps before. Eight years ago, much of the city's showcase market square was an unkempt eyesore, where shabby pre-war German advertisements peaked through layers of post-war paint.
Much of the city infrastructure also pre-dated 1945. For the early foreign investors like ABB, Volvo or Cussons, finding a good hotel to house incoming visitors and a variety of eateries for diners was almost a greater challenge than running newly acquired businesses themselves.
The impulse that spurred Wroclaw's first leap forward was the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1997. The preparations for the visit prompted the refurbishment of the town square and the rebuilding of much of the city's basic infrastructure.
But a month after the pope's departure, catastrophe struck Wroclaw and other cities along the Odra when the river burst it banks and flooded much of the region.
Devastation turned blessing though, as flood-relief money poured into many remaining infrastructure projects. The approximately $200 million in loans from the World Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) meant that roads, regional heating systems, telephone lines and dilapidated buildings in derelict neighborhoods suddenly received attention. Despite this headway, however, Wroclaw still has a long way to go not only before it can achieve Expo host status, but also before it will be able to effectively compete with other European cities, business executives and local officials said.
"The road to Warsaw goes through plac Grunwaldzki (in the city center) and its still got cobblestones," McGovern from AmRest said. "There are some major needs there."
Wroclaw Mayor Bogdan Zdrojewski is well aware of how far the city has to go. Last week he said that he is also afraid the city will soon lose the momentum for rebuilding from the flood money, and before that the pope's visit.
"Everything that we were able to do with our own funds, we have done. I already see that we are coming up against a certain barrier which we won't be able to get over without an additional impulse," he said at a press conference.
The city may also need another impulse to keep Zdrojewski on as mayor, some residents said. Having completed two terms, the Expo initiative might in part be a ruse by Zdrojewski to defend a potentially waning political career, they said.
"I have to admit that there are many people that are tired of Mr. Zdrojewski," Roman said. "Expo is his idea. It's also a great political idea as well to maintain (his) position."
Groundswell support
Whatever the motivations, the Expo idea has struck a chord. And the initial reception is positive. Many businesses and politicians are already busy calculating what they could gain from Wroclaw hosting the event.
The Wroclaw airport is also looking to Expo to put the regional hub out front following a reshuffling of PPL, the state run airport company.
"After the changes in PPL, there will be no easy money going to the airports," said Jaroslaw Sztucki, marketing manager at the Port Lotniczy Wroclaw, the local airport. "Small airports can't develop on their own."
That means that investment must come from the outside. Sztucki estimates that having Expo come to the city could result in zl. 150 million-zl. 200 million ($37.5 million-$50 million) in investments.
McGovern also stressed the importance of the chain reaction that could potentially come out of the Expo initiative. "I think anytime you force infrastructure, you're going to improve the long-term business environment of the city," McGovern said. "For me, it's going to improve the GDP (gross domestic product) of Wroclaw for a long time."
Not only has the business community given its initial blessing, so have politicians in Warsaw. In a recent visit to the city, President Aleksander Kwasniewski and Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek both lent their initial support to the idea.
And despite the work needed, the city is moving full steam ahead. First the city snagged Wladyslaw Serwatowski, a former public relations adviser with the Polish Agency for Foreign Investment (PAIZ), to coordinate the organization and promotion of Wroclaw's offer.
Serwatowski has already set up key pep rally dates to elicit support inside and outside the country. Along those lines, this week Wroclaw is hosting a press conference on the release of the United Nations' (UN) 1999 World Investment Report and the World Trade and Development Report. "This is to show that Wroclaw is a city like Shanghai, Paris or Washington, D.C.," Serwatowski said. "Only select cities can have the presentation of this report."
Wroclaw will probably submit its formal application to the BIE next June in Paris, on the eve of the opening of Hanover's fair. If the initial application is well received, Serwatowski will be lobbying government officials to announce Wroclaw's candidature on June 22 when Poland has a national day at the Expo in Hanover.
According to Serwatowski, based on Hanover's experience, Wroclaw will probably not get the final go ahead from the International Bureau of Expositions until 2003, six years prior to the 2009 target date. In the meantime, Serwatowski is pushing hard to get the word out and obtain local and national official backing for Wroclaw's bid.
"This is a great time to promote and create the image of Wroclaw as a candidate city," he said. "You need to have a long, long training (period) to jump 2 meters 40."
