Up next for Minnesota Zoo: A new home for snow monkeys

Three years after completing the first phase of its “Heart of the Zoo” improvement plan, the Minnesota Zoo is setting its sights on another round of upgrades to its aging spaces in Apple Valley.

Zoo officials are working with a construction and design team on plans for the $20 million second phase, which includes a new home for snow monkeys, a meerkat exhibit, plaza improvements, and updated lobbies, restrooms and retail space.

The zoo hopes to convince the 2015 Legislature to provide construction money for the project, which received $5 million in design and planning money from the 2014 state bonding bill.

Ken Kornack, the zoo’s director of facilities and capital projects, said the snow monkey habitat is one of the zoo’s most visible exhibits. It’s also original to the zoo, which opened in 1978.

Zoo visitors currently look down at the animals, an arrangement that was considered normal at the time the zoo was built. But now it’s frowned upon to house animals that way, especially primates, Kornack said.

The new exhibit will bring the snow monkeys up and out of the ground and put them in a more natural habitat, as opposed to having the animals down in “a concrete bunker,” he said.

The project is the latest in a series of Minnesota Zoo improvements.

Major zoo projects completed since 2007 include the $30 million Russia’s Grizzly Coast exhibit and central plaza, the $3.9 million Medtronic Minnesota Trail renovation, and the $20 million Heart of the Zoo phase one.

The Heart of the Zoo’s first phase, completed in 2011, included a new main entrance and a penguin exhibit.

According to the zoo’s 2014 state appropriation request, phase two is “a complex project that leverages urgently needed asset preservation with the zoo’s most pressing exhibit renewal project and a visionary new habitat development.”

A big focus is updating the snow monkey exhibit. Aside from its outdated design, the exhibit suffers from decades of wear and tear and has animal care spaces that are “literally falling apart,” the zoo said in its 2014 request.

The project will also repair 45,000 square feet of walking areas that connect the zoo’s exhibits, including plazas that are deteriorated to the point where they are compromising the integrity of tunnels, pipes and other infrastructure below those areas, the zoo said.

Kornack said the project team is keying on the plaza surrounding the snow monkey exhibit, an area that has taken a beating from year-around visits to the zoo over the past 36 years.

Upgrades to the lobby, restrooms and retail spaces are also in the works. The existing retail spaces will be renovated and turned into a new meerkat exhibit, according to Kornack.

PCL Construction’s Burnsville office is the project’s construction manager at-risk.

PCL was the successful bidder this fall in best-value competition that considered the bidder’s fee, project approach and the assembled team, Kornack said. Seattle-based Portico Group is leading the design.

One of the construction challenges is respecting the occupants of a building that’s open year-around.

John Jensvold, PCL’s director of project development, said it’s reminiscent of a project that transformed Knott’s Camp Snoopy into the Nickelodeon Universe theme park at the Mall of America in Bloomington.

PCL completed the $25 million Nickelodeon Universe project in 2008.

“You want people to get excited about the construction, but not impeded by it,” Jensvold said.

The only added dynamic at the zoo is that it always has living occupants, even during closing hours, he said. Construction protocols have to respect that when it comes to things like work hours and bringing materials in and out, he said.

Kornack said the project involves 12 to 14 months of construction. If the zoo gets funding from the Legislature in 2015 and “all the balls fall where they need to,” the project could be completed in July 2016, he said.