Why won’t Sacramento Zoo move to Elk Grove? It boils down to money and vision
Sacramento Zoo leaders are committed to keeping the zoo in its longtime Land Park home, its interim director said after the Sacramento Zoological Society announced it had scrapped plans to build a new home in Elk Grove.
“Our plans are to make the zoo the best zoo that it can be,” said Sacramento Zoo interim director Robert Churchill. The zoo attracts about 500,000 guests a year, including an estimated 50,000 children who visit the site on school field trips, he said.
Staying put in Sacramento means turning the page on the $302 million, 65-acre blueprint envisioned for Elk Grove — a bitter reversal for the south county city whose plans of turning a modern, relocated zoo into a regional destination were dashed by the decision.
Elk Grove officials had projected that a new regional zoo could draw as many as 1 million annual visitors and generate some $249 million in economic impact in its first five years of operation.
“Elk Grove was a great partner. We shared that vision of bringing that zoo to the community,” Churchill said. “It became apparent that the original vision — what we had and what we were able to build — that there was a significant difference between the two.”
Elk Grove had spent approximately $4.5 million in preliminary project work, including planning, feasibility studies, design and engineering work, city spokesperson Kristyn Nelson said Thursday.
Elk Grove had not yet calculated costs for the estimated thousands of work hours spent by city staffers, Nelson said. Elk Grove paid another $9 million for the land that would have housed a new zoo.
“The city is confident the value of the land has appreciated sufficient to offset the project planning and design costs to date,” Nelson said Thursday in a statement, adding that Elk Grove leaders will consider options for the 100-acre project site at a future date, including a possible sale of the parcel to recoup project costs or fund other community uses.
The society’s decision Wednesday ended the four-year effort to erect a new zoo on former farmland in Elk Grove, a day before zoo officials were obligated to meet a $10 million Thursday funding deadline. Zoo officials had committed to supply $50 million toward the project by May 2027, much of that from donations, but donors’ pledges were expected to fall far short.
Thursday also marked the annual Sacramento region fundraising campaign Big Day of Giving. The nonprofit Sacramento Zoological Society had raised $98,199 on Thursday, nearly matching its goal of $100,000. The society raised a total of $96,238, collecting 454 donations during the 24-hour period last year.
Society donors committed just shy of $19 million toward the Elk Grove zoo project, Churchill said. But the interim director, who took over leadership of the zoo last fall, maintained donors’ contributions were not a factor in zoo leaders’ decision to walk away from the project.
Churchill said zoo leaders doubted the new Elk Grove site could be built with the money available and that, if built, its crucial first phase would not measure up to the original vision of the zoo.
Zoo leaders in a statement Wednesday said that the project’s first phase would have had to shrink in size and “several significant features” would have to be abandoned as a concession to construction costs. Zoo officials said later that “decades and significant additional investment” would be needed to complete construction.
More concerning, zoo officials said, was the prospect that far fewer species would be housed at a new Elk Grove zoo when it opened than in Land Park.
Elk Grove Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen disputed that Wednesday, calling the contention “misleading.”
“We are talking about phase one species which obviously would not have had the same species in the beginning as a completed zoo,” Singh-Allen said. The size of the project’s first phase, she said, was nearly twice the size of the current facility, which has been in William Land Park for nearly a century.
“Yes, (there would be) fewer species, but the habitats would have been dramatically bigger, with more animals and many mixed species habitats like the savanna,” Singh-Allen said.
Habitats like the savanna were to be a featured part of the “multi-phased, modern zoo” envisioned in Elk Grove, with animals including towering Masai giraffe, white rhinoceros, lions and smaller African species.
“We recently began to consider the risk (of going forward),” Churchill said. “There was less risk and we were better advised to remain in Land Park.”
The zoological society had long sought a new home for a cramped, aging facility that dates back to 1927.
Zoo leaders at the dawn of the project effort in 2021 had sounded dire warnings about the zoo’s future in Land Park after years of shedding signature species such as gorillas and elephants, and its struggles to maintain its accreditation with the Association of Zoos & Aquariums.
“We have had to in the last 25 years send out our bears, gorillas, hippos and elephants. And when you dwindle that away, you limit the ability to increase your revenue or attendance,” then-executive director Jason Jacobs told a city of Sacramento investment committee in April 2021, according to previous Bee reporting.
“If we continue on our path,” Jacobs added, “we are managing toward extinction.”
As efforts to bring a zoo to Elk Grove intensified, so did society leaders’ call to move to planned larger digs to the south.
But the Sacramento Zoo in February 2024 renewed its accreditation with the Association of Zoos & Aquariums through 2029, officials said, and Churchill maintains the zoological society remains in “good financial health.”
Zoological Society officials said they will provide more information on the zoo’s future and plans for Land Park at a later date “as we navigate this change in course.”
This story was originally published May 1, 2025 at 2:59 PM.
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