Akron Zoo opened its new Tom and Shelley Koutnik Center for Veterinary Care on Thursday, a $10 million, 11,949-square-foot hospital designed to bring nearly all of the zoo's daily animal care in-house. The facility offers check-ups, disease and chronic condition management, surgeries, and end-of-life care, along with dedicated quarantine space for newly arrived animals.
The project, first reported by Cleveland.com, replaces the zoo's previous veterinary space inside the Sherman Center, a building constructed in 1994 that received an addition in the early 2000s bringing it to roughly 5,000 square feet. That older building also doubled as housing for animals when needed, but the zoo had about 500 animals when it was built. Today the zoo cares for more than 2,000 animals, and the Sherman Center's veterinary facility had simply been outgrown, according to the outlet's reporting.
Rebecca Eddy, the zoo's senior veterinarian, described the scope of the team's work in comments to Cleveland.com, noting the veterinary staff examines any animal of concern, “from wild animals to snails.” The new hospital's surgery suite includes an operating table, a dental table and an x-ray machine, and it can accommodate animals as large as grizzly bears in both its surgery and treatment rooms. An intensive care unit, a laboratory and a hoofstock treatment area with an adjustable padded wall for safe handling round out the clinical spaces.
A Building Designed Around Every Size of Patient
Specialized enclosures serve birds, hoofstock, primates and large carnivores, while small, medium and large animal enclosures offer outdoor access, heated floors, and pools built for otters and penguins. The hospital also houses a kitchen for preparing animal food, a pharmacy, a necropsy room, and an in-floor animal scale. Staff offices, laundry facilities, sanitation areas, restrooms and showers complete the building, per the Cleveland.com report.
Linda Criss, the zoo's senior vice president and chief operating officer, told the outlet the hospital employs two full-time veterinarians and three veterinary technicians. Criss said having separate rooms to sanitize and store equipment increases the professionalism of care the team can provide. She added that zoo staff toured recently completed veterinary centers at other institutions during the planning process to learn what worked well and what could be improved before building their own.
Funding Drawn From State Dollars and Private Donors
State funding helped make the hospital possible. In 2024, the Ohio General Assembly allocated $1.75 million in capital budget funding through Substitute House Bill 2 to support construction, an amount state officials have also cited as $2 million, according to State Representative Bill Roemer's office. The zoo broke ground on the building in April 2025, constructing it directly behind the Landon & Cynthia Knight Pride of Africa exhibit along Diagonal Road, as Northeast Ohio Parent reported at the time.
The hospital is the centerpiece of the zoo's broader $11 million “Reaching New Heights” capital campaign, which the Akron Zoo says will also fund a Giraffe Conservation Center to bring giraffes to the zoo for the first time. The campaign had already raised three-quarters of its goal before the hospital's opening. Naming donors Tom and Shelley Koutnik have backed other zoo projects before, including the Tom and Shelley Koutnik Primate Passage, which welcomed new primate and bird species, among them white-faced sakis, sun conures and green aracari, in May 2026, per WKYC.
Why the Space Problem Had Become Urgent
Industry quarantine standards help explain why the extra space matters. Standard zoological medical protocols call for newly acquired mammals and birds to spend two to four weeks in strict quarantine, while reptiles and amphibians can require three months or more of isolation to catch dormant pathogens, according to Zoo Atlanta. Association of Zoos and Aquariums accreditation standards require member institutions to maintain a comprehensive veterinary program with diagnostic, surgical and preventive facilities that go beyond baseline federal Animal Welfare Act rules, per the Ohio State Bar Association. Akron Zoo has held continuous AZA accreditation since 1989.
The Sherman Center will not go unused once the new hospital takes over daily veterinary operations. The zoo plans to use the older building to temporarily house animals during exhibit maintenance. Zoo leadership hopes the new hospital will serve the institution for the next 30 to 40 years.
The zoo's growth has been dramatic by any measure. Tracing its roots to the 1953 opening of the Akron Children's Zoo, the institution now spans 77 total acres, with 35 developed, and has expanded its animal population by roughly 200% since 2001, according to ThrillZing. That growth has coincided with record attendance: the zoo logged 415,403 visitors in 2025, its second-highest annual total ever, and set a single-day admission record of 7,400 guests in April, per the Downtown Akron Partnership.
About 53% of the zoo's operating budget comes from a Summit County property tax levy, a 10-year, 1.2-mill measure that voters last approved in November 2020. Northeast Ohio's zoos have been investing heavily in facility upgrades in recent years; Cleveland Metroparks Zoo has undertaken its own multi-million-dollar capital projects, including the Primate Forest and CrossCountry Mortgage Forest Home inside its RainForest exhibit, as Hoodline has reported.
