Metro Councilwoman Chauna Banks and a group of activists who successfully led efforts earlier this month to keep BREC from relocating the Baton Rouge Zoo from Greenwood Park, are calling for administrative and policy changes at the zoo, as well as for an investigation into why the facility lost its national accreditation with the prestigious Association of Zoos and Aquariums.
At a press conference scheduled for 2:30 p.m. at City Hall, Banks said she planned to demand answers to the following questions:
- How BREC has spent money at the zoo;
- Why the agency hasn’t spent more over the years;
- What specifically led to the zoo losing its accreditation?
“We want a full review and a public hearing on the AZA accreditation issue,” Banks told Daily Report in advance of the press conference. “When did they know? When did the board know? When were they first notified?”
BREC announced Monday it had been notified that the AZA accrediting commission decided over the weekend to pull the zoo’s accreditation. The move came just days after BREC’s board of commissioners voted down a proposal to relocate the facility to the Fairgrounds off Airline Highway, near Santa Maria, following an outpouring of community support to keep the zoo in its present location.
Banks also said she plans to announce the formation of a commission to develop a strategic plan for the zoo at Greenwood Park. The commission will be chaired by Renita Marshall, department head for agricultural sciences at Southern University, and Donnie Miller, director of business development at the Baton Rouge Area Chamber.
“We want to keep the momentum going we saw the other night with respect to renovating the zoo at Greenwood,” Banks said. “That is especially important now that we have lost accreditation.”
BREC Superintendent Carolyn McKnight, in a statement responding to Banks’ complaints, defended the agency’s care of the zoo as well as the investments it has made over the past decade. She says BREC has made more than $8.7 million in capital improvements to the zoo since 2005.
“To state that the zoo’s decline is due to intentional negligence is categorically false and borderline defamatory toward the many men and women who work at the zoo,” McKnight says. “I invite anyone making such accusations to provide any sort of evidence to support these false claims.”
As for the strategic plan, McKnight says, BREC is reviewing preliminary designs for the current zoo site, which were developed by zoo design experts “with the goal of turning these concepts into a master plan that will be shared at public meetings in order to solicit ideas and generate a public discussion of what residents across the parish would like to see in a new zoo.”
Banks, however, says she doesn’t believe BREC or zoo administrators should have any role in devising the strategic plan for a reimagined zoo at Greenwood, given their long-standing push to try to move the zoo elsewhere.
“We want to halt all their decision making as it relates to the zoo” she said. “To have them involved is like sleeping with the enemy.”
