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ASHEBORO, N.C. – Officials at the North Carolina Zoo are keeping an eye on efforts in Raleigh to hammer out a new state budget.

They're hoping the budget won't call for cuts any deeper than those they were already forced to make in recent months.

As state tax revenues declined, so did appropriations to the zoo, which over several months were cut by nine percent. The zoo's chief of staff, Mary Joan Pugh, is hoping that's as deep as the cuts will get.

"We'd like to maintain at the existing budget level," said Mary Joan Pugh. "I hope that we wouldn't have it any deeper."

"I think we can handle what we have now," said Pugh. "If it gets deeper it's gonna be more difficult to deal with."

Like other state operations, the zoo is under a hiring freeze.

To make ends meet over the last year, it cut travel and uniform expenses and delayed replacement of some equipment.

"Some of it was replacements, things that can be put off a year or two," said Pugh. "We were in pretty good shape anyway because we had a couple of years where we did get to replace quite a bit of equipment that had been old."

But Pugh said there are many must-have budget items the zoo can't do without.

"Food, supplies, medical supplies, all the utilities, water, propane, electricity," she said.

The zoo employs 285 full-time staff year round and 100 part-timers from April to October.

Pugh said it's already a lean operation.

"It's not like a grocery store where we can say, 'OK, we're going to cut the staff,'" she said. "We have animals we have to take care of and we also have a large plant collection that has to be taken care of."

She said one thing they hold sacred and hope never to compromise is the visitor experience.

"There are just lots of things that we have left so that we can put all of our resources into the exhibits and to the experience for the visitor," Pugh said.