Oregon Zoo officials will ask the Metro Council next week for up to $6 million for elephant projects, including permission to exercise an option to buy land for a remote elephant center in Clackamas County.
About $4 million to $5 million of that ask would be to offset increased costs for the Oregon Zoo's planned six-acre on-site elephant habitat.
Votes on both requests are scheduled for next Tuesday's Metro Council meeting, the last scheduled meeting of 2012.
Metro has an option to buy the Roslyn Lake site – roughly 200 acres 4 miles north of Sandy – for about $900,000. But the agreement with the site's current owner, Portland General Electric, says the price for the site would go up to about $1 million on Dec. 31.
The option to buy the site expires in late 2013.
Money for the purchase would come from the Oregon Zoo bond measure, which was supported by 57 percent of the region's voters in the November 2008 election. The Metro Council would have to approve the expenditure.
Councilors will also be asked to choose a plan for offsetting the unexpectedly high price of the elephant habitat expansion, which was also part of that 2008 bond. Geotechnical analysis of the site led to a $13 million increase in construction estimates.
The analysis, done in advance of construction on the zoo's planned elephant habitat, found that new construction on ancient landslides would require more stabilization work – costs that exceeded the project's $30.9 million budget. A planned service road and the zoo train relocation project also came in over budget.
"We have geotechnical design challenges," zoo director Kim Smith told Metro councilors on Tuesday.
Fortunately for the zoo, Metro's high credit rating led to it getting a bonus in its May 2012 bond sale, about $10 million of which is available for Oregon Zoo projects.
Metro councilors said Tuesday they think the zoo should use about $4.9 million of that to offset the increased costs.
A quarter of the increased costs were along the planned new route for the Washington Park and Zoo Railway, which is being re-routed as part of the expansion of the elephant habitat. That came in $3.3 million more than its $4 million budget, "largely due to a trestle in one of the areas where geotechnical concerns impacted that severely," Smith said.
That planned trestle would have crossed over a visitor path near the polar bear exhibit, but would require drilling 30 feet to bedrock, Smith said. Instead, she said, a barrier will keep pedestrians from walking across the tracks when the train is crossing.
"The trestle would have been a lot easier," she said, "but the cost is not worth it for all of that, and we can continue to have visitor safety as our highest priority."
Without the trestle, the train will need a "mechanical assist," Smith said, to get up a hill where it would have used a trestle.
Along with newly planned changes to the maintenance building, the revised plans would cost less than the original $4 million budgeted for the train.
About $1.5 million in increased costs were attributed to the construction of a service road for construction traffic during the expansion of the elephant habitat, designed to keep workers and equipment away from visitors during construction. Originally budgeted at $4 million, the project is now expected to cost $5.5 million.
Smith said there were no real opportunities for significant cost savings in that project.
The rest of the increased costs – $9 million – came on the planned $30.9 million expansion and renovation of the elephant habitat. A revised plan for the habitat expansion was forecast for $34 million, still $3.1 million over budget.
Zoo officials trimmed $6 million from the plan by reducing the size of some projects in the elephant habitat, and moving others to areas that had fewer seismic challenges.
Some of those savings came through what Smith called value engineering, "tightening things up even more than we had before," including reductions to the area of the Forest Hall and the capacity of the pool.
"They're still getting a very nice plunge pool," Smith said. "This wasn't affecting the welfare of the elephants."
But Metro councilors seemed wary of cost savings coming at the expense of the quality of the elephant habitat. Where Smith asked for $3.9 million of the available bond premium cash to offset the cost increases, councilors asked for a plan to spend $4.9 million of the available $10 million.
That still doesn't include the project's contingency funding, which would be used if a situation arises after construction begins.
Councilors expressed concerns about the project's long-term quality if the cost savings go too far.
"I worry about being penny wise and pound foolish," said Councilor Rex Burkholder. "I hate to see in our best, our most famous piece, the thing that we're really proud of, we kind of cut edges and in 10 years, we go 'Why did we do that?'"
He particularly was concerned about the planned rollback of the size of the Forest Hall, the main indoor viewing area of the habitat.
"We already have 1.6 million visitors a year. If we increase in numbers, does it become – because you've reduced the area for visitors to come through – does it become like a shopping mall at Christmas, and therefore not be a very valuable experience?" Burkholder asked.
Zoo officials were expected to come back to the council with a plan to spend $4.9 million of the premium to offset the increased cost projections. They'll also have a plan to only spend $3.9 million.
The Metro Council will choose between the two plans at its Dec. 18 meeting.
The council did not discuss the zoo's newborn elephant, Lily, and the issues surrounding her ownership.
(Dec. 4, 2012)
(May 25, 2012)