The Toledo Zoo announced plans for a new bear and tiger exhibit Wednesday at a public meeting where neighbors voiced concerns about the prospect of living in proximity to the carnivores.
“I was not reassured that people presenting knew anything about how many feet it takes to separate smells, how many feet it takes to separate noises, and what is the possibility for the escape of any animal,” said Sarah Abts, of South Toledo.
“I imagine that zoos have developed protocols to make things safe, but I didn’t get the feeling from the presenters that they knew what they were,” she said.
Ms. Abts spoke to The Blade after the meeting at the zoo’s ProMedica Museum of Natural History was over. About 10 people attended, and several had voiced some of those concerns.
Bob Vasquez, the zoo’s vice president for external affairs, told the attendees that while he couldn’t guarantee that nothing like that would happen, the zoo is “trying to mitigate the issues as best possible.” The exhibit comes complete with a required fencing and “landscape buffering” to include trees along the fence, according to presenters.
Nathan Decker, project manager in the zoo’s construction department, said the $10 million to $15-million exhibit would include a meshed-over outdoor area and would hold the zoo’s three brown bears and four Amur tigers, two of which the zoo already has, with the other two to come from a unspecified number that the zoo is planning to acquire.
The exhibit would be located in the northern part of the zoo and would replace the existing 175-spot employee parking lot near Spencer Street and several houses that the zoo has purchased under the institutional campus zoning of the zoo, he said. The employees would then park at the zoo’s other parking facilities that exceed 2,000 spots total, according to zoo staff.
The exhibit would have a “museum-like” setting to include informational stands about the animals and their life in the wild, according to event organizers.
The money would wholly come from the zoo’s capital funds financed by the zoo levy, they said.
The public meeting came as a requirement in advance of a project presentation to the Toledo Planning Commission tentatively set for March 30, with Toledo Planning Commission and Toledo City Council’s Zoning and Planning Committee public hearings to follow May 14 and June 17 respectively, according to event organizers.
Mr. Decker said the project is in its design phase. Construction was originally planned to begin in November, 2020, but was then pushed back a year to begin in November, 2021, he said. With construction expected to take about 18 months, the exhibit wouldn’t open to public before May, 2023.
Contractors would be determined in a competitive bidding process once the project is approved by the city, he said.
“The goal of this whole exhibit is to highlight the role of large predators in the world [where] they help sustain populations of different species in the wild,” Mr. Decker said. “The public will benefit from being able to see those animals in a different way [from now] — being more active and displaying more of their natural behaviors in the wild.”
First Published March 12, 2020, 1:00 a.m.
