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 have more than doubled, allowing the zoo to reinvest in the institution and nearly double its employee count. The nonprofit has grown annual attendance from 629,000 to nearly 1 million last year.