Troubles Still Abound for 1986 Showcase : Vancouver Hopes Expo Better Than Fair

Despite some recent world-class flops, Expo 86 wants to prove that the breathtaking, eye-popping world’s fair is not a thing of the past.

The Vancouver exposition, opening next May for a 5 1/2-month run, has going for it a spectacular site, government financing and one showpiece pavilion opened in advance to sway skeptics.

Still, troubles have abounded. Some are in the public mood, affected by problems at previous fairs in New Orleans and Knoxville, Tenn. Others are home-grown.

“We knew we had to re-establish the credibility of this business. We’ve worked awful hard on this credibility thing,” Expo President Michael Bartlett said . . . 10 days before he was fired in a merry-go-round of instability that at times gives Expo 86 the air of a circus rather than a fair.

Jim Pattison, a Vancouver businessman who is the fair’s chairman, says the big difference between Expo 86 and other recent world’s fairs is public money. The typical world’s fair in the United States is presented as an enterprise that won’t cost the taxpayer a dime, and all governments involved make clear they won’t pay any bills.

“Canadian expositions are government-sponsored. This is all funded by the public,” Pattison said. “There is an enormous difference philosophically between those two attitudes.”

Expo 86 is budgeted for a deficit of $311 million Canadian (about $230 million U.S.). Government leaders argue that it really won’t cost British Columbian taxpayers anything because some of the money is coming from lottery revenue and the rest will be recovered by sales taxes generated by Expo.

Whatever the merits of that calculation, Expo officials say they have about five times as much money as was available for the expositions in Knoxville in 1982 or New Orleans in 1984.

The fair’s 165-acre main site is on an ocean inlet called False Creek. Over Vancouver’s downtown skyscrapers is a view of the snowcapped coastal mountains.

The exposition marks both Vancouver’s centennial and the 100th anniversary of the arrival of the trans-Canada railroad at the Pacific Coast, an event that looms even larger in Canadian history than does the first transcontinental railroad in the United States.

The theme of Expo 86, transportation and communications, is being construed broadly enough to embrace anything the organizers want, including an exhibition of ancient Egyptian treasures--”Ramses II and His Times”--that is showing this summer in Montreal.

The first pavilion, known as the Expo Center, opened May 2, exactly a year before the rest of the fair. Expo Center’s highlight is the Futures Theater, where 350 spectators watch visions of the future unfold around them and then vote, by pushing colored buttons, on how things will turn out.