How the Legislature Approved $295K for Zoo Work—and Ended Up Spending $14M

In 2015, the legislature approved a resolution with a fateful clause.

When Monroe County Executive Adam Bello announced new renderings for the Tropics Complex at the Seneca Park Zoo a couple of weeks ago, he hoped everyone would forget about the renderings he unveiled for the same project back in 2022.

I didn’t forget and asked what happened to those original designs – and how much they cost. Only after questioning did legislators learn—behind closed doors—that county taxpayers had wasted $6 million on designs that were too grandiose to build within the $121 million budget.¹ As a result, the county completely scrapped that design (save for $700,000 worth of work that can be repurposed) and solicited a new design firm.

There were a few missteps. The old firm, Clark Patterson Lee (CPL), didn’t specialize in zoos. (The new firm, Cambridge Seven, does.) There was a failure to get CPL to design something that could be built on budget. Bello’s original vision of a 220,000-gallon aquarium likely was never feasible with the funds on hand, and the tank has now been reduced in size by a third.

But there was another misstep: the legislature was unable to provide any oversight until it was too late because we were never informed that the county had to go back to the literal drawing board.

To understand how, we have to go back almost a decade.

In December 2015, the legislature approved $28,856 for LeChase Construction to provide construction management services and $266,678 for Clark Patterson Engineers, Surveyor, Architects, Landscape Architect (now named CPL)² to perform design and engineering services for the “Tropical Exhibit and Main Entry Plaza Project.”

The resolution had a fateful clause that allowed the county executive to execute “any amendments necessary to complete the project within the total capital fund(s) appropriation.”³

For the following eight years, two subsequent county executives added a lot of amendments to both firms’ contracts– nearly $14 million worth.⁴

They were able to add all this spending to the original contracts because the legislature approves a capital budget every year, which in most cases included allocations for this project. This budgetary structure, combined with the fateful clause in the 2015 resolution, allowed for massive contract expansions without direct legislative input. It should also be noted that those legislators in 2015 weren’t voting on a project of this present-day scope.

Should the legislature have been told about these substantial amendments? Absolutely. The administration should be required to return to the legislature for any amendments exceeding a certain threshold. Doing so would ensure we can ask questions about the status of projects and address cost concerns before they spiral out of control.

Consider this: not one current legislator was in office when that 2015 resolution was passed.⁵ Without periodic updates or opportunities to vote on major changes, we had no way of knowing that CPL was still working on the project.⁶ The most significant amendments, all under Bello’s administration, including multimillion-dollar increases, never came before us for a vote. This lack of visibility contributed to how $6 million was wasted on an unworkable design.

When construction bids on the original design came in way over budget around the same time as the final CPL amendment, the legislature heard the news through the media. The administration quietly dumped CPL and over the next year held a design contest in which three firms were each paid $20,000 to submit bids. The $20,000 fee is significant because it was conveniently $1 below the threshold requiring legislative approval, neatly avoiding oversight.

For nine years, the legislature was kept caged, unaware of crucial information needed to demand accountability, while the administration lit millions of dollars on fire.

A world-class zoo is a community asset worth investing in, but that’s not a reason to keep the legislature in the dark. Moving forward, the legislature must establish stricter reporting requirements for large projects and enforce oversight on any major amendments⁷ to prevent something like this from happening again.

1. In 2022, Bello announced the project would be $121 million. The most recent announcement put the cost at $100 million, which is misleading. Most of the $21 million has been spent on the amendments detailed in this post, as well as a $4.6 million access road. The legislature approved bonding $102.9 million in 2022, giving the project a slight cushion for cost overruns.

2. Both local firms have been prolific political donors to both parties, CPL and its CEO to a lesser extent in recent years.

3. You can read the resolution on page 65.

4. The administration says LeChase hasn’t yet been paid the money added to its contract in 2023.

5. County legislators are subject to 10-year term limits, while the county executive can serve 12 years—two years longer than part-time legislators. This imbalance of power limits the legislature’s ability to build and retain institutional knowledge, one of the few sources of influence they can develop over time. At the very least, legislators' term limits should match those of the county executive, if not exceed them, to better balance power and preserve valuable experience.

6. We have a public contract portal, which posts heavily-redacted contracts. That’s how I found out about the $20,000 fees to the design “contest” entrants. Forcing legislators to comb through hundreds of contracts to “discover” something is not a transparent way to conduct business.

7. I will now be looking for any clauses in our resolutions that allow the administration to make significant amendments to contracts.