Exhibit projects dragging at S.F. Zoo
Some fear focus on pandas could delay other animal habitat updates
Three years ago, the San Francisco Zoo enthusiastically shared plans to convert an old sea lion exhibit into a new habitat for a pair of Andean condors.
The exhibit was supposed to open by last year, but today, a banner advertising the “future home of Andean Condor” hangs in front of an overgrown lot. While the birds were brought to the zoo eight years ago, the only sign of progress on their future home is that the sea lions’ former swimming pool is now filled with concrete.
The stalled condor habitat is one of several recent infrastructure projects at the zoo that have faced delays or remain unfinished, raising questions about whether the institution is equipped to take on its most ambitious project in decades: hosting a pair of giant pandas.
Under a tentative agreement reached by Mayor London Breed last month, the zoo plans to build housing for the pandas due from China in 2025. The project comes with an estimated price tag of up to $25 million for housing alone, including the $3 million to $5 million needed to construct a temporary home for the bears while a permanent enclosure is built.
While the zoo seeks to accomplish both at the same time, more than a dozen people with deep connections to the zoo, ranging from zookeepers to a major donor, told the Chronicle that the nearly century-old institution should consider fixing its aging facilities
before taking on the internationally watched project. Some worried that getting the bears would divert attention and resources away from doing basic repairs and building exhibits for other animals, some of which have been housed in temporary facilities for years while construction is underway.
John McNellis, a longtime zoo donor, called facilities at the zoo “sadly dilapidated.”
“The $20 million it would cost to build a new panda enclosure might be better spent in bringing our zoo back into pristine, first-class condition,” McNellis wrote in an email.
McNellis hoped that the panda gift would inspire the city to increase its annual financial support of the zoo, which has been set around $4 million since 1993, to at least $10 million, “so that the zoo can complete the long overdue repairs and capital improvements to its buildings, landscape and infrastructure.” (Such an increase could be a challenge to realize: San Francisco is expected to face a nearly $800 million budget deficit in the coming two fiscal years.)
“Ideally, however, we would have both a first-class zoo and a wonderful panda exhibit,” McNellis added.
Vitus Leung, deputy director at the nonprofit San Francisco Zoological Society, which operates the city-owned zoo, said in an email that the zoo “remains committed to supporting all of our planned projects, including improvements to some of our current animal habitats.”
“We are very grateful to our donors whose funds support these ongoing efforts,” Leung said. “We also look forward to adding new donors who are excited to support the San Francisco Zoo as we prepare for the momentous arrival of the giant pandas.”
Parisa Safarzadeh, a spokesperson for Breed, said the mayor is working closely with officials from the city, zoo and China to ensure the zoo is ready to host the pandas next year.
The mayor “has and will remain at the core of this effort, and continues to lead across all agencies to ensure the panda’s new habitat is a safe and healthy environment where they will thrive,” said Safarzadeh, who called the zoo “one of the city’s most prized attractions.”
Ed Poole, former chair of the nonprofit board overseeing the zoo, said the zoo plans to work with the mayor’s office to “ensure that fundraising initiatives bolster both the zoo’s ongoing operations and existing projects while also facilitating the creation of a new habitat for pandas.”
The panda enclosure would be the biggest project undertaken at the zoo in two decades, since the opening of the $18 million African savanna habitat in 2004 and the most ambitious since Tanya Peterson, the controversial director of the zoo, took the helm in 2008.
In recent years, smaller-scale projects such as the condor exhibit have gone beyond schedule, according to timelines zoo officials presented to the Recreation and Park Commission.
Some of those projects have also had to overcome design flaws, according to current and former employees who asked to remain anonymous because they still work in the zoo or in the field and fear professional repercussions. The Chronicle agreed not to name them in accordance with its confidential sources policy.
“We already have so many projects that are halfway finished or not started,” said one employee. “We barely have enough resources, and I feel like all of it will go to the pandas.”
Leung attributed the delays on some projects to pandemicrelated issues such as lower revenue and supply-chain disruptions, which he said led the zoo to “reassess our priorities and project timelines.”
Brad Hange, a former zookeeper with the San Francisco Zoo whose 30-year career included five years at Washington D.C.’s National Zoo when it had pandas from China, said he is also concerned about San Francisco’s new panda project.
“It’s a shiny new object, and directors love shiny new objects,” he said. “They would rather put money into building a new exhibit and bringing a new lovable animal into the zoo, rather than putting money into an 80-year-old exhibit.”
One delayed improvement was the $1.5 million expansion of the zoo’s snow leopard exhibit. A month before the pandemic began, Peterson announced plans to complete the project by summer 2020, but it didn’t open until early 2022.
Another delayed project is the Lipman Family Madagascar Center, underway near the center of the zoo housing animals from the island such as lemurs and a catlike carnivore called a fossa. The project, funded with a $7 million gift to the zoo from donor Barry Lipman and his family, broke ground in 2018 and is not yet completed.
As with the condors, the San Francisco Zoo recently brought in several animals from other zoos before the work on their exhibit spaces had begun; workers said this practice is not always good for the animals. Unlike San Francisco, the Oakland Zoo has a policy of receiving new animals only after their enclosures are complete, with the exception of animals in need of immediate rescue.
Construction delays have meant animals in San Francisco have spent even longer in temporary and at times subpar housing than originally intended, workers said.
Poole, the former zoo board chair, pushed back in an email. He said assertions suggesting that the zoo’s exhibits, whether permanent or temporary, “fail to meet the needs of our animals are entirely unfounded.”
Poole noted the zoo is regularly inspected by outside regulators.
In a recent Chronicle investigation into worker safety and animal welfare issues at the zoo, former zookeepers described how a pair of orangutans brought to the zoo in 2019 were put in a 1950s-era cement enclosure — without enough room for them to swing with their arms and with limited outdoor space, they said — for two years while the exhibit was being renovated.
Other rare animals that have remained in limbo include some brought in for the Madagascar Center. They include a male fossa that has lived in temporary housing for the past six years. Several Malagasy amphibians and reptiles acquired for the center in 2017 — such as a Henkel’s leaf-tailed gecko, day gecko and a Sambava tomato frog — died before ever being put on view, according to zoo records.
The zoo did not respond to questions about the fossa living in temporary housing or about the other animals dying before the center opened. Leung said all animals at the zoo are housed in accordance with standards set by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, an accreditation organization, regardless of whether they are recently brought to the zoo or are housed out of sight from the public.
Shortly before the pandemic, Peterson told the Recreation and Park Commission in February 2020 that she hoped to complete the Madagascar project by the time the zoo completed its reaccreditation process with the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. That process was completed in early 2022.
But the first phase of the project, which includes a giant replica baobab tree and an expanded habitat for a female fossa, wasn’t completed until 2023. The second phase, which includes a 9,000-square-foot garden and a new lemur habitat, is still underway.
In his email, Leung said the Madagascar Center faced “COVID-related issues and other matters that are now resolved.” He did not say when it would be completed.
Former employees said they noticed that progress on the Madagascar Center slowed down when the zoo began focusing on other initiatives, such as renovating an indoor habitat for its chimpanzees and working on the orangutan exhibit.
“When they would start new projects, an existing project would be put on hold and they would keep redirecting attention to the new project,” said a former employee.
That worker was concerned that type of situation would be repeated, with the pandas taking attention away from existing projects. Unlike those projects, though, the panda construction will be closely watched by China.
Lipman, the zoo donor whose family the center is named after, acknowledged in an interview that the Madagascar project encountered challenges. He said the zoo quickly demolished parts of an old primate center to make space for the project, leaving an “unsightly” hole in the ground, but ran into supplychain issues during the pandemic.
Still, Lipman said he never expected the project to be completed “overnight.”
Lipman said he believed the zoo is sufficiently prepared to build an enclosure for the pandas, as long as it has enough money and can find a good architect.
“It’s really exciting,” he said. In addition to delays, design flaws have come up in some recent projects when employees with animal-care knowledge were not consulted during planning stages, workers said.
Joe Knobbe, the zoo’s manager of primate exhibits from 2016 to 2021, said the mesh that the zoo planned to use on the lemur habitat for the Madagascar Center had larger holes than recommended and could allow baby lemurs to escape, putting them at risk from predators like raccoons and seagulls.
Knobbe said he was often not included in discussions during the planning of the Madagascar Center, despite his extensive experience with lemurs.
“They had gone ahead with some design features without even running them by someone who had worked with lemurs for more than 30 years,” said Knobbe, now deputy director of the Lee Richardson Zoo in Garden City, Kan. “It frustrated the heck out of me.”
Another exhibit design issue: After construction on the snow leopard expansion, a worker said they realized the project enclosure lacked shade or a hiding place for the animal, which had to be addressed.
The zoo did not comment on the alleged design problems on either project.
As construction for the Madagascar Center continues six years after it began, some animals that were displaced by the project are still in less than ideal housing, workers said.
In a far-off corner of the zoo, a troupe of endangered Francois’ langurs that were moved in 2018 live inside an old-school concrete exhibit.
Like the promised pandas, the monkeys, which are black with distinctive white mutton chops, were originally given to the zoo by China. The zoo would not say whether the exhibit is their permanent home, or whether the monkeys will someday enjoy a new enclosure.
“It’s a shiny new object, and directors love shiny new objects. They would rather put money into building a new exhibit and bringing a new lovable animal into the zoo, rather than putting money into an 80-year-old exhibit.” Brad Hange, a former zookeeper with the San Francisco Zoo