Meetings of Interest: Animal House 🦁💸

By the end of next week, Dallas City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert will release her proposed fiscal 2027 budget. It is expected to include deep cuts aimed at closing a projected $51 million shortfall. Over the coming weeks, I’ll take a deeper dive into a few areas that policymakers have signaled as potential cuts. We start today with a look at the Dallas Zoo.

By every key measure, the Dallas Zoo is one of the greatest success stories of any City-owned asset.

Yet, as fiscal 2027 budget deliberations pick up in early August, some City officials will be eyeing the southern Dallas gem for funding cuts, just as they have for the past few years.

To understand why that is and what’s at stake, I invite you to join me on a safari of sorts through Dallas history.

By Charter, our city’s local constitution, the City Council and the Park & Recreation Board must “provide for an animal zoo” and “exercise supervision and control thereof.” Dallas ran its zoo for more than 130 years, beginning with the founding of the first one at City Park (previously Old City Park) with a couple of deer and mountain lions.

Under a public-private contract approved by a 15-0 Dallas City Council vote in 2009, the nonprofit Dallas Zoo Management (DZM) — founded by longtime zoo support group the Dallas Zoological Society — took over operations of the Oak Cliff zoo with a charge to grow and improve the facility while also saving taxpayers millions of dollars per year.

Since then, zoo revenues more than doubled, allowing the zoo to reinvest in the institution and nearly double the number of employees. The nonprofit has grown annual attendance from 629,000 to nearly 1 million last year.

The zoo is also a southern Dallas anchor, with 35% of its employees calling Oak Cliff home. It serves 130,000 children annually through educational programming, including field trips, camps, and work-study programs.

The zoo’s well-documented success is all the more amazing given where things stood in the early 2000s. Back then, the zoo was making national headlines for all the wrong reasons, including a 2004 gorilla escape and violent rampage and an ill-fated 2008 plan to ship an anxious and depressed elephant off to Mexico.

At the August 12, 2009, City Council meeting when the management contract was up for a vote, then-Mayor Tom Leppert said the agreement was intended to “take this zoo to the next level.”

“Clearly, it would not get there under the status quo,” Leppert said of his own City’s Park Department continuing to oversee zoo operations.

The business-savvy mayor also warned his colleagues not to micromanage zoo operations going forward.

“When we ask somebody to manage, we’ve got to give them the freedom to manage,” Leppert said. “We can’t continue to overlook every single decision that they make. We’ve got to have the confidence in the people and the structure of what we’re doing to allow them to go forward.”

The agreement was urgently needed at the time to save the City money as it navigated tough budget years. Zoo officials say the agreement will save Dallas taxpayers about $324 million over the life of the deal.

That 25-year contract also included a “management service fee,” a significant annual funding source that the City sends to the zoo to support operations. The logic here is that the zoo occupies 111 acres of city-owned park land, including 150 city buildings and facilities, and 2,000 animals.

By contract, the fee started at $10.8 million, rose to $13.8 million in 2013, and was set to rise annually according to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) calculator every year after that. In 2021, the CPI escalator was removed. The fee was reduced by a small percentage in 2024 and 2025. Today, the nearly $15 million payment — sometimes called a “stipend” — is seen by a handful of City Council and Park Board members as a target for cuts.

Some policymakers argue the fee is too high for an institution with so many wealthy benefactors. It is also higher than other comparable management fees in the city, they say.

Those arguments ignore the fact that people and organizations putting money toward a City-owned asset generally like to know the City will continue to contribute its fair share. There also are no comparable management agreements in the city, as zoo operations are a unique animal.

Still, at the recommendation of the Dallas Park & Recreation Board, the zoo conducted a benchmarking survey that found the fee is in line with or lower than several peer city agreements. That is despite the fact that the Dallas Zoo is bigger and the management responsibilities are broader than comparable partnerships.

As a member of the Park & Recreation Board from 2023 until earlier this year, I championed continued public investment in the zoo because I understood that every taxpayer dollar we invested in the zoo generates $18 in economic impact.

Voters clearly understand — and support — investing their dollars in the zoo too. In the 2024 bond program, more than 82% of voters said “yes” to a $345 million parks proposition that includes $30 million for the zoo. Zoo supporters are leveraging that $30 million in public funding to raise another $70 million in private funding for a multi-phase Safari Trail expansion project expected to finish by 2030.

The Dallas Zoo has done everything the City asked of it — and then some — since taking over operations in 2009 in part to help ease the City’s financial burden. Now, faced with another challenging budget period, some are asking the zoo to do even more, with less.

Dallas should not reward a roaring success by putting it on a diet.

Dallas City Council members are expected back from recess next week. I’ll be back with a complete newsletter edition on Sunday night.