San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Is this real?’ Panda plan for S.F. Zoo faces hurdles
Mayor’s agreement with China just first step in process that will take years, cost millions
Henry Chang spent more than a decade of his political career trying to broker deals with China to bring pandas to the Oakland Zoo. About 20 years ago, he helped build an enclosure for the animals at the zoo, arranged a $300,000 payment from the city of Oakland for panda research, and even garnered support from former President Bill Clinton.
But his dream never came to fruition because of tense diplomatic relations, he said.
“It all depends on what China wants,” said Chang, a former Oakland City Council member. “The whole thing is politics.”
Now San Francisco Mayor London Breed is trying her luck at bringing pandas to the Bay Area. She arrived home from a trip to China last Sunday touting a letter of intent she signed with the China Wildlife Conservation Association to send a pair of pandas to the city in 2025. It’s the same organization that Chang reached a similar agreement with for Oakland in 2000.
Breed held up the deal as a major victory for San Francisco, one that would strengthen ties with China and boost tourism and the economy in a city still struggling to recover from the pandemic. Securing a pair of the playful and endearing bears would also represent a political win for Breed, who is seeking to distinguish herself from a cadre of challengers vying for her seat in November.
But past efforts to bring the bears to the Bay Area show that the agreement reached by Breed represents merely an early step in a long and costly journey. Success would require the city and zoo to pull off a major fundrais
ing effort and the zoo to clear permitting hurdles at both the local and federal levels.
Among the logistical challenges for the zoo: figuring out how to supply the ravenous bears with the hundreds of pounds of bamboo they eat each week.
Details of the plans are sparse, and it’s unclear whether the expected costs — prospectively $1 million per year to lease them from China, plus an estimated $23 million to $25 million to build and renovate enclosures — will be offset by the benefits, given the experiences of other North American zoos. The San Francisco Zoo faces added scrutiny over hosting such high-profile guests after complaints from 20 current and former employees about animal welfare and worker safety, detailed in a Chronicle investigation this month.
Politicians throughout the western world have long fought to obtain giant pandas from China. Those trying their hand at “panda diplomacy” have included former San Francisco Mayors Ed Lee and Dianne Feinstein, and pandas did make two monthslong tours to the San Francisco Zoo during Feinstein’s tenure in the 1980s. In 1993, thenSan Francisco Supervisor Angela Alioto came back from China with a letter of intent hoping to bring pandas to the city longterm, but ultimately could not secure funding.
Alioto hopes Breed will succeed, but she has her doubts.
“Is this real?” Alioto said. “I’m not going to get too excited until a panda gets off the airplane.”
Parisa Safarzadeh, a spokesperson for Breed, said the mayor’s efforts are steps ahead of other attempts. She noted, for example, that the letter of intent Chang received for the Oakland Zoo did not include an expected date for the pandas’ arrival. Breed recently hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit and has the blessing of highranking Chinese leaders, including the country’s vice president, to bring pandas to San Francisco, Safarzadeh said.
“While pandas coming to (San Francisco) isn’t a new conversation, the level of engagement by Mayor Breed is,” Safarzadeh said in an email.
With their wide-apart eyes and roly-poly bodies that often tumble in play around zoo exhibits, the bears attract hordes of visitors, at least initially. Former diplomat Barbara Bodine, director of Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy and an authority on pandas’ role in international relations, calls them “a perfect zoo animal.”
“The nice thing about them in zoos is they just sit there munching on bamboo for hours at a stretch and move slowly,” she said. The San Diego Zoo estimates giant pandas spend 12 hours a day feeding.
Despite their appeal, pandas’ presence at a zoo is not always a win. Before the Toronto Zoo got a pair of pandas in 2013, a local legislator who supported the plan said there were “millions of dollars to be made.”
While the pandas drove up ticket and merchandise sales in their first year in Toronto, the gains at the zoo were offset by the millions spent leasing them and on creating a shelter for the pandas, according to a 2014 report by the Globe and Mail.
Among the costs were hundreds of thousands of dollars budgeted annually to ship 84,000 pounds of bamboo from a garden in Memphis, the publication reported. The zoo also had to pay to “transport a Jurassic Park-like canister of panda semen from China” to try and impregnate the female panda because her younger male companion was “not yet old enough to be interested.”
In 2009, the director of Zoo Atlanta, one of four American zoos to have had pandas on longterm loans, successfully bargained with the Chinese government to cut its original $1.1 million annual panda lease almost by half and to drop a required $50,000 per year life insurance policy paid to China, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C., the San Diego Zoo and the Memphis Zoo have also had pandas in the past, but only Zoo Atlanta currently has them. San Diego also recently signed an agreement to host the animals again as soon as this summer. The loans, often for five to 10 years, can be extended.
Taxpayer money will not be used to pay for the pandas, Breed said in a statement Tuesday. She has proposed legislation that would allow certain city departments to help raise funds for the pandas from private groups and philanthropists.
The San Francisco Zoological Society, which operates the zoo, estimates it will cost $3 million to $5 million to renovate an existing facility to temporarily house the pandas before completion of a permanent one, which could cost $20 million, said Vitus Leung, the zoo’s deputy director.
The China Wildlife Conservation Association is expected to guide the zoo on the enclosure design, food supply and staffing needs, according to the letter of intent Breed signed in China. The pandas will be sent when those conditions are met, it said.
“Chinese engineers and panda experts have visited the San Francisco Zoo twice and, after a thorough review of many areas and departments of the zoo, have determined that we are ready to receive giant pandas in the near future,” S.F. Zoological Society board chair Melinda Dunn said in an email. “We look forward to this exciting chapter!”
Officials from China Wildlife Conservation Association and the China National Forestry and Grassland Administration are due to visit San Francisco this week for “further negotiations to finalize lease details,” Safarzadeh said.
Building the panda exhibit will require going through San Francisco’s usual planning approvals and may require a coastal development permit from the city because the zoo is near the beach. But it doesn’t appear that will slow down the proposed timeline, said Daniel Sider, chief of staff at San Francisco Planning, “unless they’re anticipating a 50-story panda-plex.”
“Human homes remain more complicated to build than panda homes,” Sider said in an email.
It’s unclear exactly where the proposed panda exhibit would go in the San Francisco Zoo, though Breed’s legislation indicated that it would be part of a new Asian Conservation Zone in the south side of the zoo.
At the Oakland Zoo, echoes of Chang’s panda campaign are still evident. Baboons now live in the exhibit originally intended for the pandas, and the bamboo planted to feed them grows wild.
Chang is hopeful that Breed will succeed in this new era, and he said he would consider it a victory for the Bay Area.
“San Francisco is a big city,” Chang said. “It’s probably so much easier for them to get (pandas) than Oakland.”
“While pandas coming to (San Francisco) isn’t a new conversation, the level of engagement by Mayor Breed is.” Parisa Safarzadeh, a spokesperson for Mayor London Breed