If you walked the Land Park Drive side of the park anytime after February, you noticed it. The pony ride lot, the little fenced paddock across from the zoo entrance that generations of kids cycled through on Saturday mornings, is gone. Workers took it apart earlier this year. No ribbon-cutting, no announcement banner, just an empty patch of ground where a ride used to be.
Here is the part that surprises people when they hear it: nobody has actually approved anything for that lot yet. The zoo wants it. The city agreed only to study whether the zoo can have it. That study runs out any day now.
The Zoo That Isn't Going Anywhere
If your last update on the Sacramento Zoo was the Elk Grove news, you're operating on old information. For three years, starting in 2021, the story was relocation. The Elk Grove City Council approved a new 65-acre site near Kammerer Road and Lotz Parkway in 2024, and for a while it looked like the zoo's future was fifteen miles south of Land Park.
Then the money math stopped working. On April 30, 2025, the Sacramento Zoological Society told Elk Grove the project was no longer viable, citing rising construction costs, and the city ended its side of the effort the same day. Sacramento's city council responded a couple of months later by extending the zoo's operating agreement in Land Park through June 30, 2028. The zoo isn't going anywhere. It's staying put in the same 14.3-acre footprint it's occupied since the 1960s, inside the park it's called home since opening on June 2, 1927.
That's the part most residents already half-know. The part that's newer is what happened after the relocation died.
Two Small Parcels, One Big Percentage
By June 2025, the Zoological Society had pivoted from "leave" to "expand in place." What it's actually asking for is specific: 4.4 acres across Land Park Drive, the former pony ride site, plus a 1.4-acre parcel on the zoo's northern boundary that includes the Swanston statue and its surrounding garden, known locally as Primrose Hill. Add the two together and the zoo's footprint grows from 14.3 acres to 20.1, a 40 percent increase, timed to land right around the zoo's 100th anniversary in 2027.
Zoological Society board president Elizabeth Stallard has been direct about why this matters to the organization: if the expansion doesn't happen here, the search for space elsewhere starts over. As she put it, "if we don't get more space in Land Park, we're going to have to go back to looking elsewhere." For an AZA-accredited zoo that draws more than 500,000 visitors a year and cares for hundreds of animals on one of the smaller footprints among accredited zoos nationally, the pressure to modernize habitats hasn't gone away just because Elk Grove did.
On April 28, 2026, the Sacramento City Council voted unanimously to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Society. It's worth being precise about what that document actually does, because it's less than it sounds like. The MOU doesn't approve an expansion. It approves a six-month process to study one, build a phasing plan, review the park's master plan, and set up a community working group. Nobody signed off on bulldozing anything. They signed off on talking about it, formally, for half a year.
The Vista Everyone Keeps Bringing Up
At the April council meeting, the two parcels drew very different reactions. Almost nobody spoke up to defend the empty pony ride lot. Longtime resident Luree Stetson explained why afterward: that ground had already been cleared, so there was nothing left to fight for.
The Primrose Hill parcel is a different story. Resident Rick Stevenson told the council the Swanston statue and its garden form a vista worth protecting as-is, saying flatly, "To capriciously destroy it makes absolutely no sense." Other speakers raised similar concerns about losing a quiet corner of the park to make room for zoo infrastructure. It's a useful reminder that "5.8 acres" reads as one number on a staff report, but on the ground it's two very different pieces of land carrying very different weight with the people who actually walk past them.
Who's in the Room
The working group the MOU sets up hasn't been formally named yet, but the positions are already staked out. A few people worth knowing if you're following this:
- Elizabeth Stallard, president of the Sacramento Zoological Society's board, pushing for the space the zoo says it needs to meet current animal care standards.
- Kristina Rogers, a 23-year Land Park resident and president of the Land Park Community Association, who has said the association isn't opposed to expansion but wants a slower, more transparent process, including specifics on traffic and parking before anyone commits to a design.
- Rick Jennings, the District 7 councilmember whose district includes Land Park, who has called the zoo one of the district's treasures and backed moving the study forward.
- Anthony Jackson, president of the South Land Park Neighborhood Association, who has endorsed the expansion outright.
- Linda Farley and other residents who spoke against the MOU itself, arguing the process is framed to arrive at expansion rather than genuinely weigh alternatives.
Rogers has also floated a specific fix worth noting: a shuttle service, similar to what other zoos use, to absorb some of the parking pressure an expanded zoo would put on the surrounding streets. Nothing has been decided on that either. It's an idea in circulation, not a plan.
The Six-Month Clock Runs Out Any Day
Here's the piece that makes this a story worth reading right now instead of six months from now. The MOU approved on April 28 set a study period that expires on September 1, 2026. That's not a typo and it's not a distant deadline. City staff are expected to come back before the council around that date to either request an extension or lay out what comes next.
In practice, that means the ambiguous middle this piece has been describing, zoo staying but not expanding, plan studied but not approved, pony ride lot gone but nothing built to replace it, is supposed to resolve into something more concrete within days of when you're reading this. Whether that resolution is "we need more time" or "here's a phasing plan," it's the first real checkpoint since April, and it's the moment residents who want a say in what happens to the Swanston vista or the future of that empty lot on Land Park Drive have an actual public meeting to show up to.
The Park Underneath All of This Is Still the Park You Know
None of this has touched the rest of William Land Park, and it's worth saying so plainly. Fairytale Town still sits at 3901 Land Park Drive, directly across from the zoo, running the same storybook play sets it's run since 1959. Funderland still runs its Friday-through-Sunday schedule for the rest of its season. The nine-hole golf course, the WPA Rock Garden, the duck ponds and picnic lawns, none of it is part of the 5.8 acres under discussion. If your Saturday routine is a walk around the lake followed by a scoop from Gunther's Ice Cream or Vic's Ice Cream, or a donut run to Marie's Donuts, or dinner on the Broadway corridor at one of the Ethiopian, Nepalese, or Japanese spots near New Helvetia Brewing Company and Bike Dog Brewing Company, none of that changes based on what the council decides in the days ahead.
What could eventually change, if the expansion moves from study to construction, is the traffic pattern along Land Park Drive and the parking supply on the streets nearest the zoo entrance, which is exactly why Rogers has pushed the shuttle idea before any shovel goes in the ground. That's a conversation for the working group, not a settled outcome. For now, the honest way to describe William Land Park is a place where one small, contested corner is mid-negotiation while the other 200-plus acres carry on exactly as they have for years.
If you're watching this process because you live two blocks from the pony ride lot, or because you're weighing what a place like Land Park offers for the long term, either way it helps to have someone tracking the details as they land. That's the kind of neighborhood-level attention Lee Mahla brings to every conversation about Sacramento's close-in neighborhoods, zoo expansion included. If a move, a downsize, or just a second opinion on the market is somewhere on your horizon, schedule a free consultation and let's talk through what's actually happening on the ground.
