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Agreement November 2013; effective 1 January 2014
Lead: On 18 November 2013 the South Bend Board of Park Commissioners recorded that a basic agreement had been reached on a public-private partnership for the zoo, with the transfer targeted for 1 January 2014; on 24 December 2013 the Tribune announced it to the city: "Zoological society to take over management of Potawatomi Zoo." On the first day of 2014 the Potawatomi Zoological Society — the support organization of 1971, forty-three years on — took over the operation and maintenance of the zoo whole. The zoo remained, and remains, city-owned; what changed was who ran it. Marcy Dean, whom the society had hired as its executive director ahead of the change, became the zoo's executive director at the transition, ending the old two-director arrangement in which the city and the society had split the institution between them. Dean's own word for the handover, given three years later, was "a rebirth." The length of the partnership is stated two ways in the city's own documents, and both are printed: the zoo's director told the Hotel-Motel Tax Board in January 2020 that the zoo was "currently under a 15-year private/public partnership," while the city's 2017 PARC Committee brochure describes "a 5-year lease which authorizes it to be managed by the Potawatomi Zoological Society which took effect on January 1, 2014." A five-year lease inside a longer partnership, renewed, would read exactly like that pair of statements, but no document reached for this history says so, and the two figures stand as their makers left them. What followed the handover is the rest of this account: the master plan, the entry plaza, the giraffes and lions and bears, and the record crowds were all society-era works, built on city ground under this arrangement.
Sources:
- South Bend Board of Park Commissioners, minutes, 18 November 2013 (basic agreement on the partnership; transfer targeted for 1 January 2014).
- South Bend Tribune, 24 December 2013, Rachel Lake ("Zoological society to take over management of Potawatomi Zoo").
- Marcy Dean, interview in Zoophoria, 16 October 2017 (the transition; "a rebirth").
- Minutes, St. Joseph County Board of Managers for Hotel-Motel Tax, 22 January 2020 (the "15-year private/public partnership").
- City of South Bend PARC Committee brochure, 2017 (the "5-year lease" effective 1 January 2014).