Good afternoon, everybody.

Welcome to the uh July meeting of the Mesker Park Zoo and Botanic Garden Advisory Board.

Uh, I'd like to call the meeting to order.

Uh, first up, looking at our um May 2026 meeting minutes.

Does anybody have any additions, edits, changes?

I move to be accepted as public.

Second.

A motion and a second.

Uh, all those in favor of accepting ass is say aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

Okay, that passes that.

Next up, we have report a report by uh executive director Beck.

Good afternoon.

Uh thank you all for joining us today and uh coming out on this warm sunny day.

Uh have a lot of updates.

Um, so I will try to talk slowly so I I don't rush through them.

Uh first of all, attendance uh in June of uh this year we had 20,800 people, which you can see was better than uh last year, but uh about a little bit below the last few years, so 23, 24, and 22 or about in the mid-20s.

Um that really I think is just because it's weather related, but we're already at 108,000 visitors for the year.

Um so that's a good number, six months in and already over a hundred thousand visitors.

Uh so that's I think that's promising for the rest of the year.

Uh revenue for the month, uh hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars in in gross uh revenue for the month.

Um you can see that's uh that's above last year and the year before that.

Uh the record for June was two thousand and twenty-two, twenty twenty-two, yeah.

213,000.

Um gift shop revenue, gift shop revenue for the month of June was 43,000.

We're already over 200,000 in gross sales in the gift shop, which you don't have to go back to far to see that that was uh that would have been a good annual year uh for a total uh all the you know, just in the really in the past five years have we really spiked up uh really since COVID uh with gift shop sales, and I think that just goes to a few things uh just gift shop merchandise um being stocked and funded.

And I think people spend more money when they're out doing things, they're spending more money out of their pocket at the zoo.

Um and we and I think zoos across the country are seeing that their in park spend is higher than uh before COVID, and that's maintaining, so that's good.

Uh concessions.

This is our um uh concessions vendors gross sales for the month.

Looks like we're our current through May, and it looks like they had several record months in February, March, and April for them, so that's good to hear.

And they're already at 163,000 in gross sales for the year uh through the first the first five months.

Their reporting lags a little bit behind though ours, just so uh just the way they report their numbers to us.

Uh VenueWorks is our concessionaire.

So that's uh that's the attendance and revenue.

Uh, before I go on to staffing and other updates, anybody have any questions on on those numbers?

What percentage do we get from uh venue works again?

Uh it is 10%, but and then it's 10% of um anything that we don't spend with them.

So, like when we pull an event ourselves and spend money with them, it doesn't factor into that, but normal daily sales, uh vending, all that, we get 10% of their gross.

Yeah.

Any other questions?

At least they pay.

Yes.

We've had a couple in the past that didn't.

Right.

Or just go eight wall for a while.

So no, that uh we continue to uh push them forward and uh continue to do a lot of things, so we're I'll let Kristen here later speak to some of the events, but we're working on um a lot of events come up here soon.

Eric, if we look ahead on the the statistics, it looks like last year we set a record in August, September, October, and it looks like our gift shop set a record, look like our grill set a record.

Uh do we anticipate that again with the special Yeah?

So that that was the months that our lantern event took place and uh uh good news to report was that all the items arrived last week.

We had six semi show up last week with all of the lanterns.

Uh the theme is really its nature, and it's got a lot of wildlife, a lot of horticulture displays, swans, uh, eager, it's beautiful.

And uh that crew will be on site starting in about a week and a half to set up, and we're on schedule to be opening um end of July.

Um we've had a little bit of hiccups with the company, and they've been great to work with as far as navigating it, but um their main workforce is um our Chinese that come in and work on visas uh to do this work, whether it's the artisan work, they s the uh building of the displays with uh welding or the painting and the fabric, they do all of that themselves.

So they've either been denied visas or uh not able to get their visas renewed.

So while they have all their shows happening all over the country, they've really been um chasing how to staff them.

So uh the setup will be uh amalgamation of a few of their experts and then a lot of local people helping them as far as being hands uh from the local labor union stuff that we've been working with uh to help unload trucks.