In this special bonus episode, we’re diving into the exciting prospect of a new zoo in Elk Grove. Hosts John and Kristyn sit down with Christopher Jordan, Elk Grove’s Director of Strategic Planning and Innovation to uncover the details behind this captivating endeavor. Christopher sheds light on the vision and potential behind the project and shares some of the economic, cultural, and environmental impacts such a venture could have on the community. Tune in to learn more about the project and how the public can participate in two upcoming meetings for the project.
Whether you're a resident eagerly anticipating new attractions in our city or simply curious about the future landscape of Elk Grove, this episode promises to be both enlightening and inspiring. Don't miss out on this exclusive conversation with Christopher Jordan as we envision a wild new addition to Elk Grove.
In this special bonus episode, we’re diving into the exciting prospect of a new zoo in Elk Grove. Hosts John and Kristyn sit down with Christopher Jordan, Elk Grove’s Director of Strategic Planning and Innovation to uncover the details behind this captivating endeavor. Christopher sheds light on the vision and potential behind the project and shares some of the economic, cultural, and environmental impacts such a venture could have on the community. Tune in to learn more about the project and how the public can participate in two upcoming meetings for the project.
Whether you're a resident eagerly anticipating new attractions in our city or simply curious about the future landscape of Elk Grove, this episode promises to be both enlightening and inspiring. Don't miss out on this exclusive conversation with Christopher Jordan as we envision a wild new addition to Elk Grove.
Announcer: Welcome to Elk Grove City Cast the podcast about Elk Grove. In each episode, we'll dive into hot topics, share what's happening in the city, and introduce you to some of the people making a difference in this place that we call home.
John Hull: Hello everyone. Welcome to this, a special episode of the Elk Grove City Cast. I'm John Hull.
Bringing a world class zoo to the city of Elk Grove. would be a transformative opportunity for our city and this entire region. The construction of the proposed new zoo, which would be built in conjunction with the Sacramento Zoological Society would generate not only a short term economic impact from its construction, but would also deliver ongoing economic benefits that would support the local economy and increase annually. Not to mention the unlimited value a zoo would bring to the educational community, here in Elk Grove.
How many of us growing up have excellent memories of our parents and grandparents walking us through our local zoo? Joining us today will be Christopher Jordan, Director of Strategic Planning and Innovation with the City, who's been working on this project since day one.
But first, let's bring in Kristyn Laurence, the Public Affairs Manager for the City of Elk Grove. Kristyn, we've been talking about the prospects of a zoo for almost four years now. It appears as though we're closer to actually turning the dirt and starting the construction of this project. Could you please give us an update on where we are in the planning and approval process as we sit here in early April of 2024?
Kristyn Laurence: Sure, John. You know, it's, it's not a done deal yet. So we'll start with the very basics. It's not a done deal yet, but it is going through the process. And last week our Planning Commission heard about this project in detail. And they did approve the project, recommend the project for consideration by the city council in a 5 0 vote. So it was a unanimous decision to recommend the project. And so the next phase would be a couple, there's a couple of critical dates coming up. There is a virtual community workshop that is scheduled for our community to be able to get their questions answered and do a deeper dive of the finance plan for this project. That wasn't a big topic of discussion in the planning commission because that's not their purview. So it's really the city council that needs to consider this financing plan and this gives the public an opportunity to ask all their questions about how this project would be funded and how wise or how it might be supported by the city. So there's a lot of information to be shared there. And so a virtual community workshop. On April 17th at 6 o'clock, people can go onto the city's website to register to participate in that, absolutely free to participate, and it is all virtual. As we move through that process, the next and somewhat final step in deciding whether this project is a go or not, would be the city council's consideration of the project that's tentatively scheduled for May 8th And so that would be a public meeting in council chambers Anyone can attend. Anyone can participate and provide their public comment at the meeting, but we're expecting that to happen on May 8th. That's where we're at in the process right now.
John Hull: We'll hear from Kristyn later in this special episode of the Elk Grove Citycast. But now, let's welcome Christopher Jordan, Director of Strategic Planning and Innovation for the City of Elk Grove.
Christopher, it's my understanding that if anyone could answer every possible question about constructing and then bringing in the Sacramento Zoo, which is currently in Land Park, here to Elk Grove, it would be you. So I gotta ask, how much of your time, the last two or three years, Has been spent preparing for this day.
Christopher Jordan: Okay, John. Thank you so much for having me on it has been a lot of time over the last two and a half years of working on this project. It's been a lot of painstaking work on the part of city staff, our design team, consultant team And especially our great partners over at Sacramento Zoological Society to get to this point. Of having a project that we think has a lot of details worked out, certainly a ton more still to come, but at this point, we've got a great design. We've put together what we feel like at a staff level is a very strong financing plan. And so we're now ready for the City Council to give their review of the project and be able to tell us are we moving this thing forward or not to the next stages of work and hopefully to an opening day. So, you know, it's been a lot of work the last couple of years.
John Hull: So Christopher, could you tell us, tell us a little bit about yourself and some of the things you've done in your 20 years with the City of Elk Grove?
Christopher Jordan: Yeah, sure. So I've been with the city for gosh, almost 20 years now in some capacity or another, I started off in our planning division just as a lowly staff planner, working on small projects, little development stuff.
And have sort of moved up through the ranks over the years. I moved up to the City Manager's Office in 2015 and was working on some special projects up there for a while. And then a couple of years later started in my current role as the director of strategic planning and innovation. It's a long, complicated title that is capturing a lot of different things. I lead a team of about four of us that work on variety of long range planning projects, both land use and policy wise sustainability and then community innovation, innovation for the organization. So we run an academy for staff on how to be more innovative, how to be lean and identify waste and work out waste from processes and governmental bureaucracy. Our long range planning stuff is a lot with land use, some transportation active mobility bike, pedestrian trails, transit…we're actually getting ready this summer. We're going to launch an update to the light rail extension master plan, which will be really exciting. So I've had a long time with, the City of Elk Grove. I have done some other work up and down the state in a prior capacity. Grew up in the Sacramento area. Actually I grew up in Land Park, not but a stone's throw from the zoo itself. My mom and I would go on occasion distinctly remember back in the late eighties they had a litter of kittens, I think, and I think they were lions, if I remember it correctly, and we'd go over there. Mom actually got a new lens for the camera. It was a big telephoto, trying to get photos of them. So, definitely really familiar with that operation. Mom's still up there with my stepdad. So, actually met my wife here at work. Been married now for, gosh, I think 13-14 years now almost. Three kids. It's fun. I'll come home with plans on occasion. I need to review like for the zoo stuff we actually had and we were early in the design process of how the circulation was going to work I brought the plans home the kids were asking to see stuff and Unrolled it and my then six year old gets out his hot wheels and starts driving around on the streets of how you get in and out, and where they're gonna drop get dropped off And my kids are always talking about how they want to go volunteer at the zoo someday and be involved in projects. So…
John Hull: And that's the whole thing about a zoo. You know, you grow, most of us grew up going to zoos and we are, some of our earliest memories as children is going to the zoo with grandma and grandpa. I mean, how can you not be excited about this kind of project?
Christopher Jordan: Yeah, no, it, it definitely is a very, very family oriented activity, very use. I think there's certainly a lot of great memories over the years of different zoos and we've started on our family travels even going. We were in Flagstaff last summer incidentally. Let's go to the zoo. Very small one, but it was nice enough to sort of get out. And it's a thing to go do. And so, yeah, no, I think there's a lot that plays in from a policy standpoint or a city development standpoint about how it aligns with Elk Grove goals and opportunities. And we spoke to that a little bit in the project over the last couple of years.
John Hull: Yeah, I got to ask this. Zoos are something you just don't go out and build. Okay. And in fact, can you… did you in your research, have you figured out when the last I'm going to call major zoo from ground up to full construction…when was the last time that was done here in the United States? Do you have any clue?
Christopher Jordan: I know we were looking at this just the other day and I'm trying to find my notes of this. The last. So there certainly have been a number of smaller facilities that have been developed over the last 20, 30 years. But when we think about big facilities, Disney's Animal Kingdom in Florida was 1998, I want to say.
John Hull: Yeah, this is, this is really unique because people just don't go out and build zoos. To this magnitude.
Christopher Jordan: Yeah, no, it doesn't happen very often. I think it was Indianapolis did a relocation back in probably the early 90s, late 80s, early 90s. And so it's really been those couple of projects that are the most comparable. No, zoos do not move on a regular basis, particularly major metro zoos like Sacramento. What we see is a lot more of investment at existing facilities. We got to go tour a couple early in the feasibility analysis, and one of those was Houston. They're going through a major capital campaign right now of remodeling a lot of the zoo. They did, sort of, they worked from the core, and they're working their way out. They've added a South America, a Pantanal habitat. They've just opened recently Galapagos. They've got a whole bunch of other stuff happening at the main entry and so they're systematically moving around through the site and there's obviously a lot of constraints with that because you're dealing with infrastructure that in many cases is a hundred years old. Drain lines that you don't realize or water lines you don't realize they're there until you're in construction. You can never find it because there are no plans for any of this stuff. And so here's that opportunity where we're using modern construction, modern planning, thinking about things of what's the site really going to operate as 30, 50, 60 years from now, and planning for all of that up front, being as thought conscious to it as we possibly can. I know even out at Land Park, they say they run into stuff all the time and there's weird things happening with their water meter that they just can't explain what's going to happen.
John Hull: Well, needless to say that we got a lot to talk about it and we're all excited about this. I got to tell you, but let's start at the beginning. Where is the zoo? Where will it be constructed and how big of a parcel of land will the zoo sit on?
Christopher Jordan: So the candidate site that we're looking at is down off of Kammerer Road right at the northwest intersection of Kammerer and Lotz Parkway. It's about 100 acres total size for the property itself. It extends from Kammerer Road all the way up to a drainage channel that's at the far north end of it. So if you go out today, out to Kammerer Road and you turn and go north on Lotz Parkway, you'll be paralleling the site as you go all the way up, ultimately to this detention or this drainage ditch that's up there at the north end of the property just on the north side of that, there's some houses in construction right now. I think Taylor Morrison's got a little subdivision coming up as part of a bigger project up there. So the whole site's 103 acres or so from that fence line along Lotz Parkway going west out the other direction. The zoo itself, though, in the way the designs worked up at this point, we've got about 63 acres what we call inside the fence line. That's actually for the animals, the habitats, the guest services, all the various features and functions that go into a zoo. The operations of it are there. The balance of the acreage goes to a couple of different things. We've got roadway improvements. We've got drainage infrastructure. There's a detention basin. Water and sewer infrastructure that needs to go in and then a pair of parking lots what we call the north lot and the south lot. The north lot’s right at the main entry, it takes you right on into the entire zoo campus itself and then the south lots and overflow a lot of the south end. So all of that together, start adding everything up. It gets to be a pretty awesome site and from we start thinking about the size and scale of this. Okay. So we've got 63 acres. It's inside the fence line, which is amazing for comparison. The existing land park zoo is only 14.7 acres. So the opportunity here is just tectonically different between them.
John Hull: And the statistics that the city has published for the construction is really voluminous. I'll cite a few. The cost of construction, 425 million dollars. requiring 2, 400 workers earning 170. 9 million in labor income. during construction. Now, you presented a number to the planning commission of 302 million. What's the difference or discrepancy there?
Christopher Jordan: Yeah. So it's not a discrepancy actually. So the total construction price, which includes the labor and materials for construction contingency, what we call soft costs, which are all sort of the design services, permits and fees and inspection we need to do furniture, fixtures and equipment to occupy all the buildings and basically make it an actual zoo. That's 302 million. The 425 you're quoting is from an economic impact analysis that we had prepared for the project. And what that looks at is not just the construction cost itself and the labor cost, but the recycling of those labor income dollars in the economy. So every time, even you as a consumer today, you spend a dollar at a local business, that dollar is then, in part, paying for the goods that you're buying, the services that you're buying, the labor that you're buying to operate that business, and then that labor income is then used at other businesses. So there's an amplification, a recycling, essentially, of the dollar through the economy. So that 425 million is more about the economic benefits of the project and how those dollars get recycled through the economy as a result of that construction effort. The actual construction price, though, is 302 million dollars.
John Hull: And the largest civic project in Elk Grove's 24 year history.
Christopher Jordan: Yes, absolutely. This is the largest project we've ever contemplated undertaking. It's larger than any of the interchange projects that we've been looking at or have constructed. We've done two since cityhood. There's a third one in the pipeline Kammerer Road extension project out to I-5 isn't nearly as big. Even District56, the construction out there is dwarfed in comparison to this project. It is quite substantial.
John Hull: Well, it's still a big capital expense for Elk Grove. And could you just give us some numbers showing the benefits that this zoo would bring to us?
Christopher Jordan: Yeah. So in terms of the benefit that this project could bring to the city in the larger region. There's a number of different factors that we end up looking at. First and foremost, you can talk about the level of labor income that comes to the region, to the city, as a result of this. So, again, that amplification effect of people spending money at a business. Now, that money gets spent at another business, gets spent at another business. And so we end up looking at that's over the first 5 years or so about $7.9 Million in labor income. Come each year at those other businesses. Another 215 jobs. $9.1 million in annual payroll and other parts of the entire metro region. Again, those construction dollars we talked about, the $425 Million, 2400 total construction jobs. $171 Million in labor income in Elk Grove and throughout the metro area during that construction period. We've also got the annual payroll from the operation of the zoo itself estimated between about 140-145 people annually on the payroll, which is about $11-12 million in terms of payroll income to those folks that are there. Obviously, there's additional concessionaires and concession services that occurs on the site, that's got another $3 million of payroll associated with it. And so we end up looking at over the first five years of operation, based upon the attendance figures that we're projecting for that first five years, it ends up being about $249 Million in total economic impact to the city and the region as a result of that project. So quite a bit overall, when we look at just the city's sort of sales tax and transit occupancy taxes or transient lodging taxes that would be accumulated just inside the city in the 5 year period, that's about $4 million dollars that's generated there. So that 4 million and then regionally it's probably about another $9.4 Million, but a lot of that gets transferred because it's, you're going from Land Park to Elk Grove at that point. So there are a bit of upsides to this. Certainly something that's part of the consideration.
John Hull: Okay, and I'm just going to say all these numbers you could find on the city website to peruse on your own.
We've seen renderings, in fact that excellent 3D video that came out of Franklin High School. I love that thing. Students doing that kind of thing. Really looks like quite a layout and design. Can you kind of describe it? It's hard for us to describe it here on a podcast, but how would you describe this zoo as compared to maybe some of the other zoos in our region?
Christopher Jordan: Well, certainly compared to the existing zoo at Land Park, it is drastically different. The entire experience, how you would plan your day and go through your day would be drastically different. I'd say there's a couple of things off the top that are the really big takeaways about what makes this design different and, in some ways, really unique.
And it's a lot of what we're doing about balancing both the customer experience or the visitor experience of folks when they come to the zoo, as well as the animals and the habitat experiences that you get to experience for them themselves. So, and again, that video that's up on the website that you talked about, I think is really great for folks. It's a YouTube video. It's about 3 minutes long. You can go and check that out and get a really good flavor about what the experience looks like. But. From the moment you walk through the gate, you're greeted by this massive panoramic view across the savannah, where there are giraffe and elan and other hoofstock animals that you would find on an African savannah just there milling about, grazing, it's an incredible opportunity to sort of see that. And then off in the distance, with very little exposure to barriers, because we're doing so much in the design to minimize that visual intrusion of barriers and fences and everything, is this lion kopi, this rock structure, rock formation. That the lions are able to get up on top of, like they would in Africa, and look out across the savannah and see all of these other animals. Now, of course, the lions and giraffe and the elans, they don't interact with each other physically, but they get that visual experience that, for you, the visitor, you get to see all these. So, mixed species habitats, absolutely everywhere we possibly can and then these great visitor views. And so your day at the zoo, you're able to come in, you get that orientation like you would at any sort of major facility arrival experience with a nice big plaza and amenities there, and then from there you can go through a series of paths.
There's one sort of main pathway that carries you down the whole length of the site and that has access to the different other habitat zones that could be there in future phases. Africa's our primary focus in the first phase and so you can take this loop trail that then takes you through the savannas. You actually dive underneath one of the giraffe crossings at one point that connects the savannas together. So you get sort of this cool rock formation experience of tucking underneath this trail. You come up back into lion, you've got these great views out over lion, and then there's all the other African species behind there, cheetah, cats and others, and at the back end of the sites is this great discovery zone play space where kids can get an interactive immersive experience. There's a great play structure that’d be designed. The carousel is there. There's a train ride. There's a restaurant dining opportunity and then you get to see the animal care center where we do the nutrition and the medical services for the animals all sort of there. So you get all these different flavors of things all throughout the site, a very organized structure, the ability to do a lot of way finding and understand where you are within the campus at any point in time and really just get experiences, some amazing views to these great animals and something that you're not going to see at the existing facility today.
John Hull: Yeah, and again, I want to underline something you just got through saying when you take a look at that video that the Franklin High School students prepared, I didn't see any cages. I didn't see any fences and I'm going, wow, that is really good. And so this is really going to look nice. But you talk about it being built. This is zoo being built in phases. So what does that phasing plan look like?
Christopher Jordan: So the phasing plan is driven by a couple of things. First, that we have at any point during at least the first phases, what feels like that experience is as complete a zoo as we can possibly make it. So we want to stretch those dollars as far as we can and have it be something that people will not just come to the first time, but be able to go back to multiple times and always be discovering something and say, hey, I can't wait to come back and see it again. It needs to feel complete on day one in that regard. But we also know this is a massive project, so we're not going to be able to build everything on day one. So we've laid out a phasing schema that actually has a lot of flexibility in and of itself. Our goal for the first delivery is what we call Phase 1a and 1b. And together, these are the core components of the African experience. Again, you've got the main savannas, you've got key species, not just giraffe and elan and another hoofstock, but you've also got lion, rhino, cheetah, meerkat, okapi there's the gelada monkeys would be part of that a couple of other species that that also you'd sort of expect to see, lemurs hornbill, that sort of stuff, alligator, tortoise.
Would all sort of sort of round out that piece. Another phase beyond that, an expansion of Africa, would add another yard for potentially rhino, wild dog, hyena, great apes would be in there, and hippo. And so that sort of thing completes in phase 1c, all of Africa. And then we move off to, or into, the other zones.
California is one we've focused an opportunity on. Really, they're the opportunity to sort of look at not just mountain lion, maybe bear, river otter, but also elk and some cool features that could include in their opportunity for a big educational facility as part of that phase.
Phase three actually is relocation of back of house office space into a more formal office building, which then frees up space for phase four, which is Australasia and there we can get everything from the Australian subcontinents mainland Asia. So tigers, orangutan, wallaby, Komodo dragon, all that sort of stuff kangaroo. Yeah, more likely wallaby, but yeah, you get all that sort of stuff in there Red panda could potentially be in there as well. And so that sort of rounds out then the facility At that point so the phasing plan again is really structured that in phase that initial delivery. We've got enough there It's actually going to be about 28 acres for that phase 1a 1b together, which is in and of itself, twice the size of the land park facility, and then there's all this other stuff that gets added onto, and it's designed in a way where you can do it in any sort of phase or order at that point, like, we don't have to do 1c before we do 2, we could do 2, we could do 3, and then 2, and then 4, and then 1c, you just have a lot of flexibility there based upon donor partnership opportunities.
John Hull: So put a timetable to that. When would phases 1A, 1B?
Christopher Jordan: So 1A, 1B, our hope, I mean again, if council moves this project forward, it starts opening up the possibilities. Ideally we think that 1A, 1B in their totality have the opportunity for opening in 2029. It would take a lot of work to get there. We've got a lot more design work to do. We've got to get construction level plans together. We have to get our contractor on board. Most importantly, though, we need partner funding to make this happen and the way the financing plan is structured is yes, there is a big component of this the City of Elk Grove is bringing to the table to make happen, but we absolutely desperately need partnership opportunities, partnership from the greater region to really make this happen. So there's about $80 Million to the financing plan that's needed. So if that $80 Million dollars can come to the table and partner with the city's components of the financing plan that in a reasonable time frame that unlocks our ability for 2029 to have open.
We are looking at maybe a preview phase that could be open in 2027, but we're not 100 percent confident that everything's going to line up for that quite yet. And so once that's been done again, hopefully in 2029, that then starts lining up for everything else. And again, the way the phasing plan is structured. Those other pieces can start coming online, independent of each other, because that first phase, not just you get the core facility up front, you get all the back of house support, the ring road, the service area, the animal care center, initial warehouse space. So it allows for that stuff to come online much more cost effectively later on.
John Hull: Interesting. And not only is this very, very ambitious from what you're describing, but only I'm going to get to the money thing again here real quick, because I find this a key point that we want to tell our residents about. 57 percent of the cost of this project will be paid by the city. But it's kind of like it's already there. Is that true? I mean the city already has that in the bank It is, you know, this is not going to be a bond issue or nothing like that…
Christopher Jordan: Right. So the way we've structured the finance plan is in four broad categories. The first is what we call development impact fees. That makes up about 5 percent of the overall cost structure. Those are fees that developers pay to the city for common infrastructure, roads, water, sewer, drainage facilities, all of that sort of stuff. So that's money essentially that we know we either have or is coming in through our normal development process. And we have seen quite an uptick in development over the last year. A lot of construction is happening, particularly in this immediate neighborhood. Which is great. So we've got about almost $15 million dollars of those developer related funds that are applicable to the project for the public infrastructure we would be building for this. The roads, the water lines, the sewer lines, and so on.
The next big pot, or about 30, a little over 30 percent of the overall funding, $90 million dollars, $93 million dollars, is essentially cash we either have in the bank today, or we're assured the way our financing, our deal structure is with other parties. And so that's made up of about $63 million of cash that we have in capital reserve funds today at the city. These are funds we have been setting aside as a city for some major community amenity project for a very long time, nearly 24 years. And the goal being of, we don't know what this project is going to be, but we're going to set this money aside because there's an opportunity, maybe to do something that helps round out the community and provide other services and amenities that would be important to the community and really set the table for Elk Grove, continuing to be a wonderful place to live, work and play.
So that's money that is in the bank today. We've got another about $16.5 Million that comes from our agreement with the Sky River Casino. Those are again dollars that either are in the bank today or they're coming in as part of their operations over the next 3 years. So we're essentially guaranteed those monies. We've got another $9M dollars that's coming from special community facilities districts that were done in targeted neighborhoods. Some of those are infrastructure related, like Lotz Parkway widening it out about $2.5 M there. That is just exclusively being used there. It's an eligible facility. It's been another $6.5M for parks facilities within the broader community. That's out of a 2nd CFD and there's no other monies or other projects for that district to participate in. And so, within the last about $4.5 Million, there are transportation dollars that these are eligible projects or our tree mitigation program. So, developers, when they cut down certain types of trees, they have to pay a mitigation fee. And so this tree, this site needs a lot of landscaping. It needs a lot of shade added to it. And so now we can partner those mitigation funds with this project and get a lot of benefit out of it. So setting those aside, yes, there is another than $80 Million or so of partner funding. I talked about it a minute ago that contributes to it. And then that leaves us about $114 Million that's left. That is then a bond pro package. It's a type of bond program that isn't like a general obligation bond where it has to go out to the public. It's something it's a special type of tax deferred package loan package and we've done stuff like this before. And so these programs then allow us to then pull that cash in that extra $114 Million. And so the repayment on that again is from dollars that we already have today that aren't earmarked for another purpose. We have the Zoological Society partnering in with some of that repayment. And so, when you add in our repayment on the bond and all the other cash we have, we're at about 57 percent after setting aside for the impact fees, because those are infrastructures we're going to build. Anyway, if you pull out those casino dollars, we're actually below 40 percent in terms of what the city's participation is of actual dollars that come out of our general fund. And so, yeah, it's a, it's a very complex funding program, but it's also a very diversified funding plan. We're not reliant upon one thing exclusively.
John Hull: Well, Christopher, in your presentation to Planning Commission, you reported not first of all, that the zoo is open that once it is open, you project an attendance of 1, 000, 000 people. That's like in the 1st year. Plus no further financial support needed from the city to keep that zoo operating. And how's that possible?
Christopher Jordan: Yeah. So this, the Zoological Society has put together a financing, operational pro forma. That then looks at what their operational cost is going to be, what it's going to take to operate this thing. Are they going to be able to pay, participate in the debt service that we have structure for the project?
And what they're showing is, yes, they have sufficient revenue at these attendance levels. They think the attendance levels are perfectly reasonable. We hear a lot from them and from the community, really. Land Park only does about 500, 000 visitors annually, which for a metropolitan region of our size is on the lower side, vastly lower. And we saw some of those numbers in the feasibility study that was done two years ago. For a metro of our region, we should be seeing more likely a million visitors annually. And so they're being a little conservative in some of the numbers, thinking, okay, opening day, we're probably pushing that million number mark, but it stabilizes somewhere around 850,000 annually.
They are absolutely used to not having a subsidy from the city. They don't get one from the city of Sacramento today, and they have not asked for, nor do I think the city would consider, a subsidy going forward on this project. It really needs to be a self-sustaining operation, and that's what they're committed to.
John Hull: And they have a lot of support too from what I gathered, especially from some of the people that came up during the public input time of the Planning Commission meeting. I was impressed with all the people that are really motivated to seeing this happen for the Sacramento Zoological Society. They really want this to happen. And so I, I believe that. I believe it can't, we could easily have a million visitors, you know, in the first year once the zoo is here. So, what is next in the process, Christopher?
Christopher Jordan: So, the next steps in the process… Next week we've got a meeting for the public to join us online. We're going to do a little Zoom webinar for folks to hear a presentation. We'll dive into more of the details around the financing plan, how that's structured. We will have an opportunity for Q& A as part of that and try to get those questions answered as best we can. That will then lead into the City Council's consideration, which is scheduled now for May 8th. It'll be an in-person meeting at the council chambers begins at 6 o'clock in the evening and folks can come on down and provide comments or just listen in. You can certainly watch from home. We are any other comments, written comments folks want to provide. Absolutely. They should send them in now or over the next few weeks if they'd like to. Supportive, against the project, whatever your comments are, we are open to hearing them. And we're going to transmit all that to the council. So, ultimately, May 8th is the date where the council would get the full presentation and consider what they think the next steps ought to be. Are we moving the project forward or not?
John Hull: Well, Christopher, Jordan, thank you so much for all this hard work you've been spending on the last two and three years on just this project.
And we will keep our CityCast listeners informed as we do get closer and closer to further approvals and then, eventually, what we hope will be very soon the start of construction and thank you very much. It was great to have you.
Christopher Jordan: Pleasure. Great to see you.
John Hull: Now let's bring back into today's CityCast special episode, Kristyn Laurence. Now, Kristyn, we've talked about the economics, the proposed construction timelines, most of the nuts and bolts of this proposed zoo. So let's talk about what the zoo could mean overall to the culture and amenities of and for the city.
Kristyn Laurence: Well, you know, the city of Elk Grove has always been a very family friendly community. It's always looked for and valued family values. I believe that the zoo project is something that's consistent with those values. There is a lot of development in the area that's proposed for the zoo. There's some housing communities, but there's also some really interesting design and urban planning elements that are going into that area to make it more of a entertainment district or Urban ish hub, right? So there's the Kammerer Road urban design plan that talks about making Part of that space a job center. We've got the Sky River Casino in that area There's still some property around the casino that is still yet to be determined on what that looks like and what the future of that will be. But I think that projects like these, and I've heard the Mayor talk about this, really could be transformational for the community.
It would really set a standard for excellence within the city and create a destination experience. I know there's been quite a few council members and former mayors that have talked about making Elk Grove a destination. And I think projects like this one certainly support the idea of, of a placemaking and transformational destination-like experience.
John Hull: Well, again, could you please repeat what the timeline ahead looks like for the remaining portion? Of the approval process for the city.
Kristyn Laurence: Yeah. So once again, there's a couple of critical dates coming up with respect to this project. On April 17th at 6 p. m. There is a virtual community workshop that's going to focus primarily on the financing plan for this project. But people can join that meeting, register on the city's website, and this is their opportunity to get their questions answered about the financing portion. There will be some project overview and an additional presentation. Our website at www.elkgrovecity.org/zoo also has a lot of materials for people to look at and review to educate themselves about the project. And then lastly, coming off of that workshop, we expect that on May 8th will be the city council's consideration for this project and it will be a public hearing. And this is a public meeting. We encourage The public to attend and provide their public comment if they like to share feedback and their opinions on the project. So two critical dates coming up that people should know about.
John Hull: Okay, thank you so much Kristyn. Kristyn Laurence and we also want to thank Christopher Jordan for being with us on this special edition of the Elk Grove CityCast.
For more information about the proposed move of the Sacramento Zoo to Elk Grove. You can find out everything you want to know from the city website, www.elkgrovecity.org/zoo. Again, thank you for joining us on this special edition of the Elk Grove CityCast. I'm John Hull.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Elk Grove CityCast.
Tune in again next month for more interviews, information, and happenings around town. Like what we're doing? Please rate, review, and subscribe to the show to spread the word in Elk Grove and beyond. Want more news before the next episode? Follow the City of Elk Grove on social media or sign up to receive the City's weekly email update at www.elkgrovecity.org.