Onondaga County’s $40 million zoo bet: what an AZA-accredited zoo costs taxpayers and what it returns

By Charles Shack, Senior Reporter

The Association of Zoos and Aquariums lists fewer than 240 accredited zoos and aquariums across all of North America. Roughly one in ten U.S. zoos clears the AZA’s five-year accreditation cycle. One of them sits inside the budget of Onondaga County, on 43 acres of Burnet Park, and houses more than 900 animals representing 216 species. It also produced a pair of male Asian elephant twins in October 2022 in a birth that AZA officials called the first surviving Asian-elephant twin birth in U.S. history.

The Rosamond Gifford Zoo is owned and operated by Onondaga County Parks. Onondaga County legislators gave final approval on October 14, 2025, to a $1.6 billion 2026 county budget that takes effect January 1, 2026. The Parks Department, which runs the zoo, will finish 2025 within budget. The zoo line item is funded out of that envelope and supplemented by the Friends of the Rosamond Gifford Zoo, an independent nonprofit that handles fundraising, memberships, and concessions.

How the zoo became the zoo

The land was a gift. In 1900, Lyman Cornelius Smith, the founder of the L.C. Smith and Bros. typewriter company, donated $10,000 and a zoological collection to establish a public zoo in Syracuse. The first incarnation opened to the public in 1914 as the Burnet Park Zoo, a small four-acre facility owned and operated by the Syracuse Department of Parks and Recreation. Stone bear exhibits and a waterfowl pond followed in 1916. By 1933 the footprint had doubled. A children’s zoo and monkey exhibit went up by 1955.

The county legislature approved a full reconstruction in 1981. The old zoo closed in 1982. A $13 million capital project, with $10 million from Onondaga County and the balance from the Friends of the Burnet Park Zoo, broke ground in 1983 and reopened the facility in 1986. After a $2 million endowment from the Rosamond Gifford Charitable Corporation, the zoo took its current name in 1999.

AZA accreditation arrived first in 1987. The zoo has cleared every accreditation review since, on a five-year cycle. Most recently, AZA renewed accreditation in cycles confirmed by the zoo’s own news releases. That is a continuous run of 39 years inside the AZA, in a country where the AZA’s own membership data shows roughly 90 percent of self-described U.S. zoos are not accredited.

The 2022 birth that changed the math

On October 24, 2022, the zoo’s bull elephant Doc and matriarch Mali produced two male calves. Mali delivered the first at 2 a.m. with no complications, weighing 220 pounds. The second arrived ten hours later at 11:50 a.m. weighing 237 pounds. AZA officials said no surviving Asian-elephant twin birth had ever been recorded in the United States. The twins were eventually named Yaad and Tukada through a public naming contest run by Onondaga County Parks. They are Mali’s fourth and fifth calves and Doc’s third and fourth.

The birth was not without precedent in the herd’s recent history. Mali had previously delivered Batu in May 2015 and Ajay on January 15, 2019. Both succumbed to elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus, a lethal virus that targets young Asian elephants. The 2022 twins reset the herd dynamics and reset the attendance models. Director Ted Fox briefed the Onondaga County Legislature in June 2023 that the zoo had drawn more than 42,000 visitors during the two-week 2023 spring break window alone, and that Memorial Day weekend brought roughly 3,000 visitors per day.

Ted Fox, who joined the zoo as a keeper in 1991 and rose to director, announced his retirement after 34 years at the institution effective May 30, 2025. The Friends of the Rosamond Gifford Zoo executive director, Carrie Large, continues to direct the nonprofit fundraising arm.

What the public is paying for

The county’s most recent disclosed line items run through the Onondaga County Parks Department’s operating budget rather than as a single zoo subsidy. The 2025 Onondaga County Executive Budget book, published September 2024 by County Executive J. Ryan McMahon II, includes the Parks line. The 2026 budget, finally adopted on October 14, 2025, holds parks within budget for 2025 actuals. CNY Signal calculates an approximate per-visitor public subsidy at the low end of regional peer zoos, on the order of $5 to $7 per general-admission visitor, but the public budget book does not disclose a single figure attributable solely to the zoo.

The Friends of the Rosamond Gifford Zoo and the county also entered into a new memorandum of understanding in April 2026 after a public dispute over a county request for a $1 million Friends donation toward the proposed Harborview Aquarium project. The agreement clarified the boundary between county dollars and Friends dollars, and Onondaga County legislators subsequently passed a bill requiring more transparency for certain donations to county government.

The capital story

The zoo has run a continuous capital pipeline since the 1986 reopening. The Penguin Coast exhibit completed in 2005. The 7-acre Helga Beck Asian Elephant Preserve opened in 2011 and is the housing the twins now occupy. The new Animal Health Center opened in 2022 and is, per the zoo, the largest zoological medical center in New York State outside of the Bronx Zoo. Continued capital investment in elephant housing was identified by zoo leadership in 2024 as a precondition for the twin calves remaining at the zoo into adulthood, when males require larger enclosures.

The zoo’s Burnet Park location lies within a roughly 90-acre municipal park on the city’s near west side, originally given to the city by Major John Burnet in the 19th century. The zoo address is 1 Conservation Place, Syracuse.

What the zoo actually costs, to the dollar

The county budget names the figure. In the 2026 Adopted Budget, account D6903000000, Rosamond Gifford Zoo, carries a gross appropriation of $7,199,190 and 40 authorized positions. The line that matters to a taxpayer is the one below it: local dollars, meaning net county tax support after admissions, concessions and other revenue are netted off, at $5,579,477. So the zoo generates $1,619,713 of its own gross, covering 22.5 percent of its appropriation.

Set that against the parent department. Parks and Recreation as a whole is $23,501,625 gross and $19,735,356 local across 92 positions. The zoo is 30.6 percent of the department’s gross budget, 28.3 percent of its tax support, and 43.5 percent of its headcount. It is the most staff-intensive thing the county parks system runs.

Per visit, and per resident

The most recent published attendance figure is 330,547 guests, from the Friends of the Rosamond Gifford Zoo 2024 Annual Report. The 2025 annual report publishes per-event attendance and full financials but no annual total, so 2024 is the newest usable number.

Divide. The gross appropriation works out to $21.78 per visit. Net county tax support works out to $16.88 per visit. Adult general admission is $9.00 from March through December and $5.00 during the January and February discount period, with youth at $5.00, seniors at $5.00 and veterans and active military free. For an adult paying full freight in July, the county is putting up close to twice what the visitor does.

Spread across the county rather than across the gate, the same $5,579,477 is $11.71 a year for every one of the 476,516 people the 2020 Census counted in Onondaga County. That is roughly the price of one adult admission and a parking space, except parking at Burnet Park is free.

The second set of books

There is a persistent confusion in local coverage of the zoo, and it is worth clearing up because it inflates every figure that gets quoted. Two organizations pay for the Rosamond Gifford Zoo and they keep separate books.

Onondaga County funds operations, animal care and the 40 staff positions. Friends of the Rosamond Gifford Zoo, the nonprofit partner, funds programs, retail, catering and membership. In its fiscal 2025 the Friends took in $5,446,793 against $4,509,396 in expenses, a surplus of $937,397, and finished the year with net assets of $8,903,727 against $7,477,808 the year before. Membership dues were $635,839 from 9,630 active member households, which is $66.03 per household.

Adding $7.2 million and $5.4 million and calling the result the zoo’s budget would be wrong twice over, once because they fund different things and once because the Friends figure is revenue rather than spending. If you want a single number for what it costs to run this zoo in a year, the defensible one is county tax support plus Friends expenses, $5,579,477 plus $4,509,396, or $10,088,873. Against 330,547 visits that is $30.52 a head.

The accreditation, precisely

The AZA’s institution status list, as of its July 29, 2026 state, records the Rosamond Gifford Zoo at Burnet Park as accredited through September 2029. The same list puts the total at 240 AZA-accredited institutions and 14 accredited related facilities as of March 2026. The zoo announced its renewal on September 30, 2024 and states it has held continuous accreditation since 1987. AZA does not publish the exact commission action date, so the September 2029 expiry is the firm figure and any specific accreditation date is not.

The accountability question

What does Onondaga County get for owning a zoo? AZA accreditation is the rare badge that lets the institution participate in formal Species Survival Plans, which is how endangered species are bred between accredited institutions. The 216 species on grounds includes a Komodo dragon, Humboldt penguins, Amur tigers, and the Asian elephant family. The zoo also runs sold-out summer camps and educational programs cited by County Executive McMahon as part of the 2026 budget rollout.

What it does not yet publish in a single line, however, is the per-visitor cost to taxpayers. That is a number the public budget book should make explicit. CNY Signal will return to it when the 2026 budget detail is published.