Changes to Sedgwick County Zoo agreement heavy-handed, meddlesome

County officials should give thanks every day for the public-private partnership with the not-for-profit organization that has been so crucial to the beloved Sedgwick County Zoo’s private fundraising, professionalism and growth.

Instead, county officials are pressing for a revised operating agreement with the Sedgwick County Zoological Society that is chillingly heavy-handed and meddlesome. The society’s leaders say they would prefer no changes.

The proposed agreement, a copy of which was obtained by The Eagle, would more than triple the county’s share of votes on the Zoological Society board and executive committee, to about 40 percent. It also says the zoo director “will refrain from any action” that would harm “the society’s or the county’s respective reputations, or which would reasonably be expected to lead to unwanted or unfavorable publicity for either the society or the county.” A violation could get the director fired, by either the society or the county.

Like the County Commission’s behind-the-scenes role in the short-lived decision to have a subcontractor removed from a road study earlier this spring, the proposed language aimed at zoo director Mark Reed’s public statements raises serious free speech questions.

The zoo’s smooth governance was a public-private model for both the city-owned Wichita Art Museum in the late 1990s and, later, the county-supported Exploration Place. The society’s stewardship of the zoo has always benefited from being set apart from politics – an independence that has encouraged stability and private donations and served its accreditation. Seeking to update the operating agreement now “based off of the recent change to the commission,” as County Manager Michael Scholes put it, needlessly puts all of that at risk.

And for what? Do the majority commissioners really think voters will reward them for bullying the zoo? Apparently not, given how they recently decided the operating agreement can wait for completion until Nov. 18 – potentially delaying the final vote and any controversy it might generate until after the Nov. 8 general election has set the commission’s makeup for 2017-18.

Meanwhile, the county is well into its 2017 budget process with no funding agreement for the zoo, after the commission ended a five-year deal in midstream last year and gave the zoo a flat $5.6 million in the 2016 county budget.

The county should back off of the shortsighted and misguided attempt to exert more control over this prized regional asset.

This story was originally published June 1, 2016 at 12:07 AM with the headline "Changes to Sedgwick County Zoo agreement heavy-handed, meddlesome."