A Roar of Approval : New Chief Gets Lion’s Share of Credit for Bringing Zoo Back to Life

They said they would go around the nation to find a leader to pull the Los Angeles Zoo out of its mire. Turns out, they barely had to go around the block.

A day after a panel of experts marveled at the progress the aging zoo has made rehabilitating itself, much of the credit was being laid at the feet of Manuel A. Mollinedo, a Los Angeles native and veteran bureaucrat who said he is just “paying back my community.”

Mollinedo, 50, may not have the advanced zoology degree of many zoo directors, or the blueblooded philanthropic pedigree or even the gaudy collection of animal neckties of some. But what he has brought to the animal park is a quiet determination to make things better, an ease with people and an insider’s knowledge of the city’s byzantine political structure.

Steven Soboroff, the city’s Recreation and Parks Commission president who once called for a nationwide search for a zoo director, now says of his home-grown leader: “I don’t believe there is any other person on earth who could have done as much work as this man. He knows the process and how to actually get things through the system.”

Seconding that emotion was Ed Muruska, chief of the Cincinnati Zoo and one of a trio of experts commissioned to track the Los Angeles Zoo’s performance since last year. “I was just amazed at the amount of progress that has been made,” Maruska said. “This administration is right on target.”

Maruska and the two other advisors said Tuesday that the zoo now appears poised to receive accreditation this summer, a status that had been threatened because of the zoo’s outmoded animal facilities, poor housekeeping and inability to protect its collection from disease and predators, such as coyotes.

Mollinedo has lived for several years in Los Feliz, just minutes from the zoo, but he scarcely knew what accreditation meant when he arrived in February 1995 from his job as an assistant general manager with the city’s Recreation and Parks Department. He had more than 20 years’ experience as a municipal park administrator in California and Texas. But he had to acquire a reference book just to figure out all the animals that would be in his care.

For months, the color-illustrated volume bristled with yellow Post-it notes marking all of the Los Angeles Zoo’s animals. It was never far from Mollinedo’s desk, or his night stand. But now he can reel off graceful, and unscripted, descriptions of the gerenuk (a dainty African antelope), the capybara (the world’s largest rodent, from South America) and many more.

He has also faced down, with some equanimity, unionized zoo workers and a female Asian rhino. Now he feels he is beginning to master an organization that runs everything from a commissary for animal meals to a veterinary hospital to cafes and educational programs for humans.

“I have the best job in the city,” Mollinedo said. “The grounds are beautiful and in the late afternoon I can just go out and walk around and think and visit with the animals. It is just therapeutic.”

Mollinedo succeeded Mark Goldstein, a highly touted veterinarian from Boston who never adapted to the zoo’s long-standing internal intrigues or to the rough and tumble of Los Angeles city politics. After three years in charge of the zoo, Goldstein resigned in February 1995 when Maruska and the other experts slammed the zoo.

The staff often criticized Goldstein for holding seemingly endless meetings, which often concluded with a decision to hold even more meetings.

Mollinedo, in contrast, has pushed the zoo through more than 400 construction projects in just over a year, a record that, Zoo Atlanta Director Terry Maple said, “I don’t think any of us could match.”

One of Mollinedo’s first major decisions was to hire Dr. Charles Sedgwick, a Tufts University professor, to head the zoo’s health services unit. Sedgwick said Mollinedo moved briskly to make improvements and didn’t want to hear excuses about why things couldn’t be done.

“He’d make an excellent officer in a military organization,” Sedgwick said of his boss. “It was hard. But in a war, you want a guy who leads and knows where to send you.”

Mollinedo, who is paid $122,377 a year, may have to refine that style to make progress on one of the zoo’s most troublesome fronts--fund-raising. It will cost more than $300 million to complete the master plan for updating the nearly 30-year-old zoo. Only about one-tenth of that money is in hand.

“Manuel has to be able to not only muster government resources but to go out to the very top people in the community and say, ‘Support your zoo!’ ” Maple said.

Much smaller investments have already begun to remake the zoo. To the public, the most noticeable improvements have been cleaner walkways, neater flower beds and reopened flamingo and prairie dog exhibits. Behind the scenes, several nighttime animal quarters have been improved.

But the zoo’s animal handlers are still impatient for improvements in other exhibits, in particular the concrete bowl where two polar bears roast in the midday sun.

On a more mundane, but equally significant front, city officials praised Mollinedo for moving swiftly to place zoo workers on regular eight-hour shifts. Many of the employees worked nine hours a day, in exchange for every 10th day off, an arrangement that made it difficult to fully staff the facility, one official said.

Not long after he arrived, Mollinedo survived another rite of passage, his introduction to the zoo’s Asian rhino. The meeting was ostensibly to show the new zoo director rules for working with the beast, but it also served “to see how he handled a completely new experience that few people can relate to,” Sedgwick said.

“I told him to run his hands under that tough, armored skin, which he did, and to feel the very soft skin underneath--to let the spirit of the animal enter him,” said Sedgwick, chuckling at the memory. “You could see that he was touched by the experience. He has a very fine smile.”

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Profile: Manuel Mollinedo

* Age: 50

* Residence: Los Feliz

* Education: Cal State L.A., bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and recreation, master’s degree in recreation administration. USC, master’s degree in public administration.

* Career highlights: Director of parks and recreation in Alhambra, Chula Vista and Austin, Tex., before returning to his hometown of Los Angeles four years ago to become an assistant general manager with the city Department of Recreation and Parks.

* Interests: Scuba diver and instructor.

* Family: Married.