Mesker Park Zoo Executive Director Erik Beck had good news at his monthly advisory board meeting on Tuesday.
The zoo is a non-profit organization. It is both taxpayer supported, and revenue generating — there is fundraising, ticket sales and gift shop sales.
Beck reports important figures monthly to the Zoo Advisory Board.
“We go through just kind of the hard numbers of attendance and revenue,” he said. “Attendance is doing really well this year, 2024, June was a little slower, if you can remember, it was a hot June for the month.”
This monthly report overall, was positive. He said they are experiencing solid attendance. There were $40,000 in gift shop sales alone in July — a zoo record.
“So we're already over $252,000 … in sales for the year,” he said during the meeting. “And you can go back, and that was actually more than we used to do in an entire year.”
Slightly down, June and July had more than 20,000 visitors each. There are 132,000 visitors this year so far. They will likely meet or exceed the current budget.
Of course there’s also a lot of spending — feeding 700 animals is expensive and there is almost $1 million in capital improvement projects annually.
“It's about $5 million a year in operating (costs) and we do about anywhere from $700,000 to a million dollars in capital improvements every year at the zoo — new roofs, new pavement, trees, all those things to take care of a large facility.”
Following revenue and attendance, staffing is the next part of the meeting.
He said they also have several open staff positions — zoo keepers — maintenance and even departmental directors. These are the General Curator, and Director of Maintenance — a new position.
He said they will oversee “the facilities, projects, safety, security, guest services side,” Beck said.
They’ve filled two of the three zookeeper positions so far.
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