Scathing SF Zoo Audit Released
The Same People Who Broke the SF Zoo Are Being Trusted to Fix It
Late last Friday afternoon — the favored burial hour of inconvenient news — the San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst released its long-awaited performance and management audit of the SF Zoo. It is 49 recommendations across 11 findings. It is the most comprehensive accounting of zoo governance failures this city has ever produced. And within hours of its release, the politicians who commissioned it were already treating it like a closing argument rather than an opening one.
Supervisor Myrna Melgar, who requested the audit, deserves genuine credit for pushing it through. Mayor Daniel Lurie has signaled support for reform. We are glad the audit exists. We are glad it is public. We said for a long time that an independent review would confirm what we had been reporting, and it did.
But confirmation is not resolution. And a report is not accountability.
Here is what the victory lap is glossing over: the San Francisco Zoological Society — the same nonprofit, the same board structure, the same institution — is still operating the San Francisco Zoo today. A new CEO has been hired, and early signals from Cassandra Costello are more encouraging than anything we heard from her predecessor. We acknowledge that. We will watch it closely. But a change in leadership is not a change in governance, and a promise to implement 49 recommendations is not the same as implementing them.
What We Already Knew
Much of what the audit documents, SF Zoo Watch reported first. The structural deficit dating to at least FY 2018–19. Attendance in freefall — down 22 percent from pre-pandemic levels, trending downward since 2006. A $4 million management fee unchanged since 1993, now worth less than half its original value in real terms. The zoo’s repeated Sunshine Ordinance violations and its years-long claim that, as a private nonprofit, it simply didn’t have to comply with public records law.
We reported on the staff vote of no confidence. We reported on the workplace culture that the audit now confirms, in writing, was “toxic.” We reported on the accreditation concerns. We filed public records requests that were stonewalled — the same stonewalling the audit team itself experienced, before the Board of Supervisors had to place nine months of management fee payments on reserve just to get SFZS to cooperate with its own city-mandated audit.
That last detail should not be forgotten in the current mood of cautious optimism. This institution resisted scrutiny at every turn. It took a funding freeze to produce basic records.
What Is Actually New
The audit does surface findings that go beyond what was publicly known — and they are worth sitting with.
Auditors confirmed that two contractors, identified as alleged relatives of senior SFZS employees, received a combined $1.6 million between FY 2020–21 and FY 2023–24. No competitive bids. No documentation of cost reasonableness. Multiple payments in round numbers, which auditors flag as a fraud risk indicator. SFZS officials, the report notes carefully, have never denied the alleged personal relationships. The audit stops short of calling it fraud. It does not stop short of calling it a serious problem.
The audit also confirms that the former CEO approved her own expense reimbursements — including a $7,182 resort and spa charge billed as “Employee Relations” and a $4,000 reimbursement for a chartered sailboat described as a management retreat. No second approval. No documentation of who attended. Meanwhile, city guidelines specifically prohibit management fee funds from covering alcohol purchases, fundraising expenses, and staff recognition costs. Because SFZS has never prepared a cost allocation plan, no one — not the zoo, not the city — can confirm those funds weren’t subsidizing any of it.
And then there is this: the Board of Directors did not formally evaluate the former CEO’s performance a single time in the six years between 2019 and her retirement in August 2025. She submitted self-evaluations on two occasions. The Board accepted them. State law requires documented reviews before compensation adjustments. The requirement was ignored.
When the AZA’s accreditation visiting committee identified the toxic workplace culture in 2022, the former CEO did not share the report with the full Board. The Board did not ask for it. The problems the report identified persisted, undisturbed, for three more years.
The same nonprofit that stonewalled this audit is now being trusted to implement it.
The Part Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
The audit recommends that the city negotiate a new Lease and Management Agreement with SFZS by December 31, 2026. It recommends enforcement mechanisms, updated financial obligations, and regular Board of Supervisors oversight. All of that is right. All of it should happen — if SFZS remains the operator.
But that assumption deserves scrutiny that the audit, by design, could not provide. Auditors assess what is. They do not ask whether the underlying model should continue at all. That question belongs to elected officials. And right now, Supervisor Melgar and Mayor Lurie are not asking it.
They should be.
Consider what the audit actually establishes, taken together: a nonprofit that hid an accreditation report from its own board, paid alleged relatives of senior executives more than $1.6 million without competitive bids, allowed its CEO to sign off on her own expenses, conducted no formal CEO performance review for six consecutive years, violated the Sunshine Ordinance twice, stonewalled city auditors until a funding freeze forced compliance, and has presided over two decades of declining attendance and a structural operating deficit that now exceeds $7.9 million annually.
This is not a description of an organization that stumbled. It is a description of an organization whose governance failed at every level — board, executive, finance, and transparency — simultaneously, and for years. A new CEO and 49 agreed-upon recommendations do not erase that record. They ask us to trust, again, an institution that has spent years proving it cannot be trusted.
Mayor Lurie and Supervisor Melgar should be asked directly: what happens if SFZS misses the audit’s June 1, 2026 good-faith deadline? What is the actual consequence when — not if — implementation stalls? The audit is honest that the city’s only real enforcement lever is termination of the management agreement, an option so drastic no one will use it. That dynamic does not change because auditors wrote better recommendations. It changes only when the city decides it is finally willing to use the lever.
Or, more precisely: it changes when the city decides the lever should have been pulled already.
The city should terminate its Lease and Management Agreement with the San Francisco Zoological Society and use this moment — with public attention, political will, and a detailed audit in hand — to reimagine what this institution can become. The land belongs to San Francisco. The animals belong to San Francisco. The opportunity to build something worthy of this city, on this site, does not belong to an organization that spent three decades proving it cannot steward what it was given. The lease should end. The conversation about what comes next should begin now —It’s time to tear down the San Francisco Zoo and build EcoPark SF!