Whose Zoo?

In 1976, a revolutionary plan launched Woodland Park Zoo's celebrated transformation from a typical, dismal menagerie to a world model of humane and naturalistic zoo design, replacing pens, pits, and cages with lush "habitat immersion" for animal residents and human visitors alike. Social species got room and terrain to live in "large, naturally sized social groups," at least somewhat as they would in the wild. Entertainment features that didn't serve this spirit of '76, such as a kiddie train, were eliminated.

Now comes the counterrevolution. When the zoo released a new plan last year, then-director Mike Waller and other officials were at pains to note that it preserved "80 percent" of the 1976 scheme, including many ongoing improvements in animal care and housing. But the devil is in the other 20 percent of the new vision: "Most of the issues of first-order urgency have been resolved with such success that the zoo has won no less than four Best of Exhibit awards from the American Zoo and Aquarium Association," the plan notes. "The result of this success is that the zoo must rebalance itself to better serve its more than 1 million visitors."

To do this, Woodland Park would install just the sort of non-zoological amusement it kicked out in 1976: an antique carousel, with rental space for birthday parties; an interactive "Discovery Center" that would further entertain the kiddies; and an "Event Center," accommodating up to 400 guests, for rent to larger gatherings. These additions are supposedly needed not to boost attendancethe plan projects that will grow regardless, to nearly 1.4 million by 2020but to better serve visitors already coming. The obvious question: If attendance grew without these amenities, from a mere 600,000 in 1976, why does the zoo need them now?

THE NEW PLAN HAS been in the works for three years. Zoo officials thought they had finished last year, but they got mired in a legal morass as neighbors protested the plan's impact and the city's land-use arbitrator roundly scored the plan's legal and environmental deficiencies. Now zoo planners are wrapping up another try. In the upcoming version, they will try to fill the gaps in the previous one, but will still express a basic change in vision and intent from the 1976 long-range plan.

More and more, Woodland Park Zoo thinks like a business and is constituted as one. The long-range plan that's finally adopted will consolidate a regime change agreed to in 2001, transferring operation and control of the zoo from the city Parks Department to the private Woodland Park Zoological Society, formerly the zoo's fund-raising auxiliary. But the trail has been a bumpy one. Zoo staff and consultants embarked on the project in early 2000. Early last year, after spending half a million dollars, they tendered would-be final drafts of the plan and the attendant environmental-impact statement (EIS). City Parks director Ken Bounds approved them, paving the way for City Council approval and consummation of the privatization agreement. But then the zoo's neighbors (the Phinney Ridge Community Council and attorney Mickey Gendler) contested the EIS, contending that it didn't adequately address traffic and other development impacts. This time, the NIMBYs were right. Last July, hearing examiner Meredith Getches blew a hole in the EIS large enough to walk an elephant through, overturning it on several important grounds, and zoo planners got back to work.

They expected first to have revisions drafted at the start of this year, then in February, then in April. Now the zoo's publicity office says a revised plan and new EIS will take as long as they take. "It turns out there was more work involved in order to finish," explains project manager Jim Maxwell. "We want to make sure we do a good job."

THESE EXERTIONS POINT up just how much was lacking in what should be an epochal document for the zoo. Environmental- impact statements are supposed to posit alternative approaches to help policy makers arrive at the best one (even if that has a funny way of turning out to be the scheme favored by the folks sponsoring the EIS). The zoo folks appear to have been so ardent about their plan, they didn't go through this exercise. As the appellants complained, and Getches concurred, they merely offered the obligatory "no action" alternative (sticking with the 1976 plan) and five variations on a single, preferred alternative. The only significant variations: whether a proposed parking garage would have 710 or 888 or 1,054 spaces, and sit at the zoo's south or west entrance or be split between both. As Getches tartly noted, you'd think this was all about "development of a parking structure, not a long-range plan to guide future operation and development of the zoo."

The failed EIS contended that all the additional parking (up to seven stories, mostly underground) wouldn't draw more visitors; it would merely induce those already coming to stop parking on neighborhood streets. But space in the zoo's current surface lots usually goes begging, while visitors save a few bucks by parking on nearby streets. The 2002 plan doesn't outline any measuresfree parking or residential parking stickersto fix that.

LIKE THE ANIMAL INMATES under the 1976 plan, human staffers will see their habitat expanded and improved under the new scheme. They'll get a two-story office building with a private gym and nearly twice the space of the trailers and smaller building in which they now work. It's touted as a "green" building using "natural materials and energy-efficient design, creating simple, more-natural places for zoo staff and volunteers to work"just the sort of language used to describe naturalistic animal enclosures.