Elk Grove City Council votes to take next step toward landing Sacramento Zoo on 70 acres
Elk Grove took another step toward landing a regional zoo as its City Council voted 5-0 Wednesday to extend its exclusive six-month negotiating pact with Sacramento Zoo officials through May.
Elk Grove and the Sacramento Zoological Society have been working since last summer on a plan to move the aging 14.7-acre zoo from its longtime Land Park home to a new 70-acre site at Kammerer Road and Lotz Parkway in southeast Elk Grove.
With the extension, Elk Grove and the zoo will send out requests for design proposals, craft a memorandum of understanding and begin creating the first 41-acre phase of the zoo’s master plan. A second, 29-acre phase will follow.
“The society’s partnership with the leadership of Elk Grove creates the possibility that we will be able to give our region — and this state — a new zoo and all of the incredible experiences that come with it,” Elizabeth Stallard, the zoological society’s board president said in a statement Thursday following the Elk Grove vote.
On Wednesday, the Elk Grove City Council heard zoo leaders and consultants’ vision of a 1.2 million-visitor-a-year attraction featuring animals long absent from today’s Land Park layout.
Residents received a sneak preview two weeks earlier at a March 10 virtual town hall.
“You’re really making history. You’re part of history in this environment,” zoo consultant Rick Biddle, whose firm Relevant Strategies and Solutions prepared the feasibility study, told council members. A newly built zoo would be the nation’s first since the Indianapolis Zoo in 1988.
An African savanna — and components featuring wildlife from Asia, Australia and rescued California wildlife — would be part of a new facility, as would a veterinary hospital on the zoo’s grounds as part of a potential partnership with UC Davis.
One of those long-missing species is the hippopotamus, Sacramento Zoo executive director Jason Jacobs told council members, a casualty of the current facility’s undersized habitat.
“We don’t have hippos anymore because their enclosure was smaller than this council chambers,” Jacobs said.
City officials project the zoo could provide 1,875 construction jobs, employ nearly 200 full-time workers once the zoo is open and have a $225 million economic impact on Elk Grove over its first five years of operation.
But much work and many questions lay ahead, from construction impacts to traffic, odor and noise, to what the city’s full commitment to the project will look like.
“There is a lot of work still to come,” said Christopher Jordan, Elk Grove strategic planning director.
This story was originally published March 24, 2022 at 2:07 PM.
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