Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
People in St. Louis love their local customs. Reverence for tradition is one of our town’s most endearing and enduring qualities.
It’s also among our greatest problems going forward. When warm memories of yesteryear collide with cold realities of the present year, St. Louis instinctively opts for old-school. It’s hard to imagine any other American city being more loyal to its own past.
Sometimes that’s smart—in historic preservation, for example—but when it comes to the big picture, not so much. In terms of economic growth, the most dangerous phrase in the local lexicon is “Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it.”
The compulsion to cling to the idyllic past was on full display recently when Saint Louis Zoo officials unveiled a grandiose 20- to 30-year, $500 million expansion plan featuring pandas, gondolas, and all sorts of exciting stuff.
See also: Here’s What the Saint Louis Zoo Could Look Like in 30 Years
But from the moment zoo president Jeffrey Bonner announced his vision for the future, he invoked one of St. Louis’ most sacrosanct traditions: The zoo must continue to offer free admission for all.
This, of course, is utter nonsense. As I suggested in this space more than seven years ago, “there’s no such thing as a free zoo.” The zoo currently receives $21 million annually in property tax revenues from city and county residents as part of the Zoo-Museum District, which was established in 1972. That’s $21 million more than it received in the good old days, when everything about the zoo was truly free.
But the real problem is much larger than not taking account of the ZMD funding. The overriding issue is that St. Louis’ love affair with the past has obscured a fundamental reality: Tourism revenue has emerged as a critical source of paying for the growth and quality of zoos in nearly every U.S. city except St. Louis (and D.C., whose zoo is federally funded).
I don’t know how to state this emphatically enough. Time has passed us by. Free admission is to the world of zoo finance what an eight-track is to the world of music. It’s quaint, nostalgic, and not at all useful today.
By recent estimates, the zoo receives 3.2 million annual visits. No fewer than 35 percent of those visits come from people outside the St. Louis area, and another 21 percent come from area residents beyond St. Louis city and county. Only 44 percent come from those of us whose tax dollars form the bedrock of the zoo’s existence.
See also: There's No Such Thing As a Free Zoo
On average, a tourist family of four should reasonably expect to spend $70 for zoo admittance. This is an ever-rising number, up more than 30 percent from the $53.30 we calculated in 2009.
There are a number of ways to look at this, and none justifies free admission. If the more than 1.1 million tourists who visited our world-class zoo paid the going rate, it would reap almost $20 million per year. If St. Louis–area residents who aren’t contributing to the ZMD were asked to pay at the door, it could net another $12 million annually for the zoo.
Not all of that combined $32 million would be realized annually, because some visitors—especially residents from outlying counties—would choose not to come. But only a fraction of tourists would eschew our zoo if it charged what zoos charge everywhere else.
Zoo officials fret about losing some of these budget-driven tourists, and point out they spend about $8 per person inside the zoo (so much for it being “free”). But the essence of tourism spending is to attract people with disposable income. Targeting tourists who cannot or will not spend market value for our zoo is like a steakhouse marketing to vegetarians.
A different issue—but arguably as important—is that something like 660,000 free visits are made by people who live in the St. Louis area but pay no taxes to support the zoo. This illuminates St. Louis’ grimmest financial reality: Less than 50 percent of the region is expected to foot the bill for all of its essential institutions.
St. Louis city and county represented more than 80 percent of the region’s population in 1972, when the ZMD was established. Now that these two entities represent less than half of the population base—with the area’s greatest income growth in nonpaying St. Charles County—the funding model makes no long-term sense.
St. Louis can only stay economically viable if this outdated structure is fixed, and I’m not speaking just of the ZMD. Somehow, some way, the region needs to develop the same sense of community about funding its essential institutions and infrastructure that it has about its sports teams.
Rest assured, if the Cardinals win the World Series, there are no nonresident residents. Everyone living within 50 miles of the Arch is proudly a St. Louisan. City and county barriers evaporate.
It should be that way 365 days a year. The metro area will never realize its potential, nor thrive in the long-term, until it starts thinking like a region and not a smattering of rival political fiefdoms.
See also: St. Louis' Tourism Moment
That’s why I suggested, in 2009 and 2013, the following strategy: (1) Reassert that the zoo and other ZMD institutions will remain “forever free” to residents of the taxing district who support it; (2) change state law to give the boards of the Saint Louis Zoo, Saint Louis Science Center, Missouri History Museum, and Saint Louis Art Museum the authority to charge admission to non-ZMD residents as they see fit; (3) invite surrounding counties in Missouri and Illinois to join the ZMD, likely at a lower rate of taxation than the residents of St. Louis city and county pay; and (4) start collecting tens of millions from tourists.
My idea was to treat this as a ZMD issue, not merely a zoo question, and I think it’s inappropriate for the zoo to be going it alone as it is now. It is true that the Saint Louis Art Museum understandably has no interest in raising admission (roughly half of its counterparts don’t) and it might not be worth the trouble for the small Missouri History Museum to bother with it. But it should have the right to do so, just as a fifth ZMD member, the Missouri Botanical Garden does. (It was exempted from the free-admission mandate when it joined the ZMD in 1983).
The Saint Louis Science Center has remained mum on the subject, as one might expect, but it’s one of only three of its kind in the nation not to charge admission. Its visitorship breakdown is almost identical to that of the zoo, meaning it is leaving untold millions at its entrance as well.
This is not purely the business of these institutions and their governing boards for a simple reason: The zoo has reflexively asked for public tax support to fund its expansion plans.
Specifically, it is floating the idea of new sales taxes throughout the region, and that’s where this matter is transformed from the outdated to the outrageous.
If we’re talking new sales taxes, we’re talking about humoring the zoo’s obsession with free admission at the expense of investing in core priorities such as police or transportation needs. That’s not a false choice. It’s a real stupid one.
There’s simply no justification for the zoo to use our tax dollars to give a free pass to people who live in other cities that make us pay to visit their zoos. (And by the way, all of them have figured out a way to do it logistically, something our zoo officials treat as an impossible dream.)
I think it’s a great thing that ours is one of the few communities to give major ongoing public support to our great cultural institutions through the ZMD, and it should stay that way.
The payoff for that support should be to continue our cherished free admission to the zoo and the other institutions. But that should be for the people of our community—those living in ZMD jurisdictions who support the institutions with their tax dollars. Ideally, that should include not only the city and county, but also the surrounding counties, which are every bit as much a part of St. Louis.
When the ZMD was established in 1972, zoos and science centers barely charged tourists at all. But the world has changed with regard to investing in tourism, and it is incredibly poor public policy not to change with it.
We have five great institutions in the ZMD, but one giant problem: In the name of tradition, we’re stuck with a 20th century tourism model in the 21st century.
A co-owner of St. Louis Magazine, Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
