What’s in a name (for a zoo)? The high-stakes, high-risk money game being played by village idiots at taxpayer expense

Despite the glaring absence of its fundraising guru, Kevin Bell, credit for naming a new zoo in Elk Grove came to a fist-fight Wednesday night, January 22, 2025 between the mayor, a councilman, and the existing chair of the zoo board. 

As a $400 million project, the largest endeavor yet in the city’s 25-year history, someone’s bound to get their nose bloodied. So far, the body count includes the resignation of the existing zoo director as well as the city’s director of finance. Still no Kevin Bell...

Apparently, naming rights are the psychological factor driving fundraising by the Sacramento Zoological Society (SZS) through its corporate donors. This is according to zoo board chair Elizabeth Stallard, a business law attorney for corporate grocers, retailers, and the hospitality industry.

Half of the board is composed of attorneys, consultants, and lobbyists. Identity is key to how other potential zoo donors will see them when they solicit funds. The SZS must put up a cold $50, million in cash before a shovel of dirt can be turned...or so says the city manager.

Elk Grove City Manager Jason Behrmann stated at the January 22, 2025, council meeting that the SZS must meet periodic cash and pledge commitments every six months until January 1, 2027, when it will be required to hand over the $50 million in cash to the city prior to initiating construction of the new zoo.

However, page three of the staff report officially posted that the cash commitment can be met with written pledges. Attachment2 of that report states that the SZS has only $3.6 million cash in hand, while nearly $14 million remains in promised, yet unpaid, pledges. 

The zoo’s own 2023 taxdeclarations demonstrate about $13 million  in revenues with $12 million in obligations; it also has $24 million in assets.

It was at the council meeting that the staff released the list of pledges, for which one Elk Grove resident, Kathy Lee, called for an audit. She stated that she could not identify the author of the zoo’s report, nor could she make sense of the listed pledges. At a million per year in net income, the SZS could afford its new zoo, without inflation adjustments, in the year 2425.

Meanwhile, councilman Kevin Spease made dramatic gestures to the mayor and the city manager, remonstrating that the SZS’ $50 million cash will be in hand before the first shovelful of dirt is turned for the project...right? He joined councilman Darren Suen in expostulating that the taxpayers of Elk Grove were the primary and significantly largest donors to this project, carrying the bulk of its $400 million load. 

Should the city of Elk Grove decide to take this project forward and the SZS go into debt to pay its $50 million share, the city could be stuck with repayment of that loan as well. That’s because this entire endeavor is a project owned by the city of Elk Grove, its land, its buildings, and its responsibility...in other words, it’s on the taxpayers’ dime.

There’s another shoe yet to drop. 

The city of Elk Grove has put all its eggs in the new-zoo basket. The zoo’s funding plan for taxpayer dollars includes diverting virtually every discretionary dollar available from the city to the zoo for the next thirty years. That means other projects the city will need now and into the future will go without local matching funds, including extension of light rail to, wait for it...the new zoo. That extension has been on hold for decades and will likely not be built. The price tag: a mere $400 million.

At least Elk Grove Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen has a sense of humor(?) She admitted she’d not thought of simply calling the zoo what it is: the “Elk Grove Zoo.” Had she done so, she could have saved the city tens of thousands of dollars in consultant fees. 

My suggested name? To me, any zoo is an “exotic animal prison.”