Zoo dream implodes as the first half of Elk Grove’s 2025 concludes with cascading controversies
The first half of 2025 has been anything but quiet for Elk Grove. It began with the city’s marquee Sacramento Zoo relocation collapsing in spectacular fashion, and the first half of 2025 has added another subplot of fiscal migraines, legal threats, and political optics.
After months of uneasy whispers, the $300 million zoo deal was officially called off on April 30. City Hall blamed the Sacramento Zoological Society (SZS) for failing to raise its promised $50 million, while the society pointed at inflation and operating-cost fears. The passive-aggressive blame game played out publicly the next day, with each side insisting that the other had walked away first.
The fallout left taxpayers holding about 100 acres of land purchased for exhibits that will never be built, and Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen without the legacy project she once hailed as “really about the animals.”
Slow & Low goes slow, low … and dark
The zoo wasn’t the only civic bet to fizzle. Slow & Low, a barbecue showpiece in Old Town touted by City Hall and propped up with a $500,000 loan guarantee, shut its doors after barely six months.
By June, the city sued proprietor Michael Hargis, asking a judge to foreclose on his Sacramento River property to recover roughly $442,000 that the bank had already yanked from the guarantee account.
A $4 million handshake for 20 prime acres
Even as staff digested those losses, the council voted 4-0 on June 25 to sell a publicly owned 20-acre parcel on Elk Grove Boulevard to El Segundo–based CenterCal Acquisitions for just $4 million, a price critics called a sweetheart deal in a sizzling real-estate market.
The land is meant to anchor “Project Elevate,” a long-delayed retail-hotel hub once marketed as Elk Grove’s answer to Santana Row. But the scaled-back version moved forward under ominous skies: a labor-backed law firm representing the Sacramento-Sierra Building & Construction Trades Council warned the sale itself violates CEQA and threatened litigation if the city keeps treating environmental review as an afterthought.
Those same building-trades unions are among the largest campaign donors to Singh-Allen and councilmembers Darren Suen, Rod Brewer and Sergio Robles—an awkward backdrop as the city argues the unions’ CEQA warning is merely leverage for a project-labor agreement.
A State of the City with open doors—and open clichés
June also brought Singh-Allen’s annual State of the City address, but for the first time, the Chamber of Commerce could not charge admission. A 2024 opinion from the state attorney general stated that a majority of the council in the room makes the event a public meeting, so the doors had to remain open and free. The resulting speech, delivered at District 56, was panned as cliché-ridden and lacking substance.
Big Tobacco money keeps rolling in
Campaign disclosures filed in February showed the mayor doubled down on controversial donations, pocketing another $2,000 from Philip Morris USA on the eve of the 2024 election, despite guidance from the state Democratic Party advising against accepting tobacco donations. It was her second tobacco check in three months.
IRS liens linger
Compounding image problems, public records revealed that the Internal Revenue Service had filed (and later attempted to resolve) multiple tax liens totaling roughly $79,000 against Singh-Allen and her husband for unpaid federal taxes from 2019 to 2022. Critics seized on the filings as a red flag for someone steering multimillion-dollar municipal budgets.
Half-time scorecard
Six months in, Elk Grove residents have watched a landmark zoo plan implode, a taxpayer-backed restaurant default, a bargain-priced land sale ignite new legal threats, and their mayor field questions about lobbyist day-jobs, tobacco checks and the tax man.
With CEQA lawsuits looming and no clear replacement for the zoo acreage, the second half of 2025 may test City Hall’s resilience even more than the first.
#8647 #NoKings #ProDemocracy
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1 comment
Wow, cumulatively, it's been a very ugly six months for our city and its leadership. Let's hope new leadership gets an opportunity to import creative, innovative, well-vetted and common sense ideas to our city. Enough of poor decisions, self-serving politics!
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