Horticulture Dept - Anonymous employee Dallas Zoo Employee Review

The Zoo is under a consent decree from the Environmental Protection Agency but they only pretended to comply with it. I was asked to falsify EPA reports, ROUND UP herbicide is used next to the flamingo pond instead of hand weeding, the drains and filters for stormwater runoff into the watershed were deplorable. Contamination occurred on a daily basis. You are coached on what to tell the City of Dallas auditors. Not trained on required procedures, just coached on how to answer the auditors' questions. The auditors also always schedule their visits shortly after the birth of cute animals. They are given private visits with the latest baby giraffe or whatever and kept distracted by it for as long as possible. This is a well known "thing" at the Zoo. It is my opinion there has not been a thorough audit at the Zoo in many years, or they would have seen the same violations I noticed. As a city taxpayer I do not appreciate this. A work order system is used which is very easy to game. Many, many times I would ask a crew leader as long as we were in a location completing a task on a work order and had all the tools with us if we should do something else in that area or an adjacent area that also CLEARLY needed doing. The answer would always, always, always be -- no only do what is on the work order. Eventually I realized the crew leaders get their brownie points not by making the Zoo look better but by making work order reports look better. Which explains why the "gardens" at the Zoo look as bad as they do. I am a resident of Dallas and consider the poor state of the display gardens at the Zoo to be an embarrassment to the entire Dallas Park system.