Disney’s business isn’t looking very good these days. They’ve laid off 7000 staff; announced the closure of their expensive and ambitious Star Wars LARPing hotel after it being open for only a year; their recently announced projects are all live-action remakes no one asked for; and a planned expansion to their Orlando campus has been scrapped. This last issue has been reported as closely related to Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s ongoing attempts to dismantle the company-run Reedy Creek Improvement District and it is this tangle that I want to dive into a bit deeper this week.
DeSantis is overwhelmingly portrayed as the villain in this series of lawsuits and legislation. His campaign to diminish Disney’s power over Reedy Creek is portrayed as retaliation against the company and its CEO’s public opposition to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, aka the “Don’t Say Gay” bill which would prevent teachers addressing or discussing sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom. Retaliation against Disney for speaking in support of teachers and queer folks isn’t a good thing for DeSantis to do, but characterizing him as the villain in a two-sided fight makes Disney the upstanding empathetic hero, which is just not true. To me this case is another instance of Republicans making the right call, but for terrible reasons and using idiotic tactics to do so.
The first step in the creation of the Reedy Creek Improvement District happened in 1966 when Florida’s Ninth Circuit Court accepted a petition signed by six Orange County landowners to organize a drainage district on their boggy Central Florida land. These companies were all, of course, shell corporations owned by the Walt Disney Company and their intention was always to do more than drain their land. Walt Disney and his company had acquired the land in order to build the combination theme-park/company town of EPCOT which I have written about for Digestable a couple of times, so after establishing the drainage district they petitioned Florida a second time to incorporating the Reedy Creek Improvement District and the cities of Bay Lake and Reedy Creek (now Lake Buena Vista).
This legislation, which remained in place until DeSantis & Co’s challenge last year, established the RCID as an autonomous entity where Disney controls the land use, planning, transit infrastructure, fire departments, policing, emergency services, environmental regulation, water, drainage, and waste management. The District is governed by a five-member board elected by landowners in the district, though residents of Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista are denied voting rights in these elections which leaves Disney as virtually the only voting landowner in the district.
Closely related shell companies running the entire government in the municipalities where they do their business? That’s Boss Tweed Tony Soprano territory and the move to abolish the RCID would be cutting off one of the Disney octopus’s strongest tentacles, despite DeSantis’s queerphobic intentions. But after the Florida legislature set the date by which the RCID would be abolished, Disney threatened that Florida would be in charge of paying out the District’s $1 billion in municipal bonds and taking over the government services in the area if the state proceeded as planned. The bond issue could be easily contested in court, since Disney should be liable for issues with its own assets, but the bill’s drafters hadn’t cared to specify that in the bill and someone like DeSantis would never stand for taxing Floridians to run their local fire department. So because they cared more about the publicity of scolding Disney for its ‘wokeness’ than actually doing the work to take down a nefarious oligarch, the Florida legislature started working to reverse the RCID’s abolition just as soon as their first bill passed.
In the end the Florida legislature decided that the RCID would remain largely the same, renamed the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District and with its former power to build an airport or a nuclear power plant revoked. As his own anti-democratic power grab, DeSantis decided that he, not the District’s landowner(s), would appoint the new board, but Disney wasn’t done fucking with Florida. The day before the RCID was to be replaced by DeSantis appointees, the outgoing board passed an agreement granting Disney sole power to develop and run the district until “21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III,” essentially stripping the new board of any power over the corporation. Disney’s invocation of a royal lives clause feels truly villainous, a huge fuck you to the entire idea of state governance, a self-declaration of kingship over their swath of Florida swamp.
The royal lives clause isn’t law and, like the bond payment issue, could be easily contested but DeSantis doesn’t care enough to do so. He has his new name for the board and he can tell his voters he stuck it to Disney without having to actually govern and collect taxes. Disney, apparently, doesn’t care much for queer rights either. They quickly fired CEO Bob Chapek, who initially spoke out about the Parental Rights in Education Act, when the whole debacle started and replaced him with their perennial fixer Bob Iger.
Underneath all this arguing about who gets to run this patch of Orlando-adjacent swamp and who gets to say “gay” while they’re there is the reality that none of this land was ever legally ceded from its native people. Spain first established settlements on the peninsula in 1562, but indigenous nations remained powerful players despite waves of disease and colonial warfare. During the beginning of the 19th century the Seminole nation, which had coalesced long before American independence, became increasingly unpopular with the United States because of their reputation of providing asylum to escaped slaves. Following the US’s annexation of Florida from Spain in 1821, the US started a series of three deadly and expensive wars against the Seminole nation over more than 40 years, with the small number of remaining Seminoles fleeing either to Oklahoma or to undesirable land in the Everglades.
Disney and Desantis are both the worst kind of evil: self-interested entities that don’t care much about anything. Disney cares about queer visibility if it helps its customer perception, but if that hurts its bottom line they’ll fire the person that spoke up in the first place. Disney will also sue over its right to make statements it doesn’t believe in because corporations are, according to the Supreme Court, people with rights. DeSantis and other Florida legislators care about combating corporate interests if it helps them grab power and galvanize their supporters. But when it turns out combatting corporations means they actually have to run public services and collect taxes, they’ll try to retract their sloppy legislation as fast as possible while slapping on a new name that makes it look like they did something.
Disney and DeSantis both see the RCID as a poker chip, a commodity that can be used to build profits or clout with voters, land that needs to be improved with drainage and anti-democratic governance structures. Neither party sees it as what it really is: a unique place that has served as a refuge and a homeland for indigenous and enslaved people for longer than Disney or the state of Florida or the United States has existed. There are plenty of villains in the Magic Kingdom of Reedy Creek, but I don’t know if there are any heroes.
Above: map of a Seminole reservation which was briefly established in 1923 during the Treaty of Moultrie Creek.
Below: Walt Disney pointing to the location of the Reedy Creek development near Orlando.
