Evaluators Give Zoo Poor Grade

The troubled Los Angeles Zoo has been slugged again, with a team of experts giving it a harsh report card and delaying a decision for a year about whether to re-accredit the 30-year-old institution.

“This is an institution permeated by mistrust, skepticism and cynicism,” says the report by three zoo directors who visited Los Angeles in May. “In view of the Los Angeles Zoo’s history, there is no reason to expect that the zoo will not be allowed to slide downward unless its governance structure is significantly altered.”

The American Zoo & Aquarium Assn. last week gave the zoo until next summer to fix dozens of problems outlined in the report or risk losing its accreditation, which Los Angeles Zoo Administrator Manual Mollinedo said “would be devastating.”

Accreditation is crucial because it enables a zoo to trade animals with other institutions, and to qualify for grant money, Mollinedo said. Losing the AZA approval, he added, “would reflect very poorly not only on the Los Angeles Zoo but on the city in general.”

The possible loss of accreditation is just the latest in a string of controversies that have plagued the zoo in recent months.

Another expert panel found substandard habitats and sanitation problems in a report issued last February, and the zoo has long suffered from internal squabbling over spending priorities, dwindling attendance and weak fund raising.

Former Zoo Director Mark Goldstein resigned in February after a tumultuous three-year tenure marked by the accidental death of an African bull elephant and controversies over the living conditions of chimpanzees and penguins.

In the most recent investigation, zoo directors from Denver, Louisville and San Antonio interviewed dozens of employees and community leaders and spent three days at the Griffith Park facility, finding myriad problems with safety, the physical plant, finances and employee relations.

The team found unacceptable working relationships among zoo staff, management and governing authorities, noting that many employees did not understand their job responsibilities, and some had not been evaluated in a decade. They also said the total financial support was inadequate to meet the institution’s needs, and said the zoo did not have a regular program of facility maintenance.

Plumbing, sidewalks and roadways were all deemed unacceptable, as was training for emergencies.

The experts criticized zoo officials for allowing public access to dangerous areas, and said the park lacked quarantine facilities for new animals.

“Although most people we talked to believed that the zoo had ‘turned the corner,’ there is an enormous amount of prevailing skepticism as to the city’s long-term commitment to the zoo,” wrote Charles F. Freiheit, director of the Denver Zoological Gardens and head of the inspection team that visited Los Angeles in May.

The 10-page narrative that accompanied the checklist-style report was so negative that at one point it states: “Not everything at Los Angeles Zoo is substandard.”

“Los Angeles Zoo is presently an institution in transition as it proceeds to address its many problems,” the inspection team says in its report.

“The current situation offers an extraordinary opportunity to finally ‘get it right,’ but only if all of the various parties work cooperatively and productively to achieve the potential for excellence that exists.”

Mollinedo acknowledged in an interview Friday that “the report is accurate,” but said things already have improved since the accreditation team’s May visit. Finishing the job, he said, would take increased funding and support from the City Council.

“I personally feel very confident that we will be able to meet all of their concerns and get accredited this next time around,” he said.

“We’ve already addressed a lot of the concerns, so it’s not quite as grim as it sounded back then. But we still have a lot to do as far as correcting deficiencies over there.”