The Battle for Florida: DeSantis Declares War On the Mouse

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for adding this blog article to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please leave a comment below and peruse the rest of the blog, thank ye!)

When my family moved to Florida, I was seven. We lived in a part of Florida that had just exploded with new housing and thousands of relocating Americans, at the forefront of the 1980s population boom that turned Florida from a swamp-infested minor state to the third most-populated in the nation.

Part of that boom relied on the development of a major tourist attraction called Disney World, built outside of Orlando by Walt Disney's corporation in an attempt to expand his theme park empire. The popular Disneyland of southern California brought the company fortune in the 1950s but when he needed to add more rides, all the surrounding land had been bought up by developers who added their own businesses to feed off the tourism trade. By the 1960s Disney realized the next time he started a theme park, he needed to buy up all the land possible first, then start the theme park and expand from there.

The best place he could do that was Florida, where land was cheap and few people lived because the heat and humidity of most months made it untenable for non-agricultural or shoreline living. Picking a spot where a big enough airport existed to help with the flow of tourists and near an interstate to handle traffic, Disney quietly bought up as much as possible between Orange and Osceola counties in order to ensure construction of multiple theme parks and associated hotels/resorts under the company's control.

All of that land development still required a lot of corporate control, so Disney's company worked out a deal with the state of Florida by 1967: Reedy Creek Improvement District, a special taxing district run by the corporation. Disney would be responsible for paying and managing the infrastructure costs and constructions, much like its own city/county: In return, Orange and Osceola residents didn't have to pay anything towards the district, which benefitted both counties when businesses grew up around Disney's area and the population/work force grew to fill all those tourism jobs.

Everybody - except for the massive income inequality that non-union labor has to cope with - kind of won with that deal. Today, Orlando is one of the largest metros in the nation, only second behind the South Florida (Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-West Palm Beach) area in the state itself. Florida generates more money from tourism dollars than any other industry. And its allure has drawn in other industries - aeronautics, health care, energy, financial firms - to employ hundreds of thousands more. 

There may be a Busch Gardens theme park in Tampa, a Legoland in Winter Haven, a... well, does Coral Castle count as a theme park? No, it's a roadside attraction my bad. (Big thanks by the way to Neil Gaiman for shouting out the mermaids of Weeki Wachee in his work American Gods) There may be a Universal Studios park in Orlando itself, a Sea World park just down the road, and a hundred attractions along International Drive, but EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING in the Orlando metro revolves around Disney World.

They don't call it Mickeytown for nothing...

This makes it all the more insane that the Florida Republicans running our state - basically operating as one-party rule since 1998 - led by autocrat-wannabe Ron DeSantis have decided to nuke Disney's Reedy Creek Improvement District from orbit.

To the Tampa Bay Times (linking to the Associated Press reporting):

The Florida House of Representatives on Thursday gave final passage to a bill that would dissolve Walt Disney World’s private government, handing Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis a victory in his feud with the entertainment giant over its opposition to a measure that critics have dubbed the “don’t say gay” law.

The move could have huge tax implications for Disney, whose series of theme parks have transformed Orlando into one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, and serves to further sour the relationship between the Republican-led government and a major political player in the state. Disney did not return an email seeking comment Thursday...

See, what happened is that DeSantis is angling for the 2024 Republican nomination for the Presidency - he's hoping that current overlord donald trump will be in handcuffs by 2023 - so during this legislative year he pushed for a lot of culture war laws he could sign to win over the GOP's racist/sexist voter base.

That not only included a racist "anti-CRT" law that essentially made it illegal to discuss the history of racism in both Florida and the United States, it also included the "Don't Say Gay" law that makes it illegal to "discuss gender identity" to the point where teachers could get fined saying the word "gender" on school grounds in front of students, and regardless of grade level due to an "age appropriate" clause vaguely worded enough to threaten even high schoolers. When that "Don't Say Gay" law was finally discussed in the legislature and passed by the GOP-controlled House and Senate, there was a lot of media discourse about how Disney World - Florida's biggest private employer - would handle the matter.

See, over the years Disney has garnered a reputation for being Pro-People i.e., a megacorporation that actually thinks about marketing to gay/lesbian/transgender audiences as well as the other demographics (yes, there is always a profit to be made). There's been Gay Days organized at the theme parks since 1991. Disney has never openly denounced the appropriation of popular characters - especially Elsa from Frozen - as gay icons, which helped maintain the fanbase. They market it all - even as they sell themselves as "family-friendly" - as an inclusive community where love and acceptance matters more than culture war posturing.

However, Disney is still a business, and a pretty big one at that: So they've always had their eye on keeping their corporate taxes low and government regulation off their backs. This means a lot of campaign contributions to Republicans on a regular basis, especially at the state level to ensure nobody messed with the flow of revenues.

So when Disney's head honchos were all asked about how they felt about Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill, their first response back in March was... well, hem-hawing at best. Which led to a major walkout of Disney employees angered by the spineless owners. Shamed by the public display, the CEO took a harder stance early in April, after which DeSantis still signed the bill into law while accusing Disney and others who opposed it of "grooming" kids, like the theme park was staffed by registered sex offenders.

And at that point, DeSantis called for a special legislative session - usually the state legislature works for six weeks to pass bills, and if it misses anything they have to hold special sessions at taxpayer expense - not only to force the legislature to approve his gerrymandered nightmare of a Congressional map but also to remove Disney's special tax district as punishment. Back to the AP article in the Tampa Bay Times:

The bill passed by the legislature on Thursday would eliminate the Reedy Creek Improvement District, as the 55-year-old Disney government is known, as well as a handful of other similar districts by June 2023. The measure does allow for the districts to be reestablished, leaving an avenue to renegotiate its future. The bill now moves to DeSantis’ office to be signed into law...

Democrats have criticized the Disney proposal as clear retaliation against the company and warned that local homeowners could get hit with big tax bills if they have to absorb bond debt from Disney — although such details are far from clear.

Disney is one of Florida’s biggest private employers, last year saying it had more than 60,000 workers in the state. It is not immediately clear how the company or local governments around its properties would be affected if the district was dissolved...

You can kind of see the carrot the Republicans left in the bill, where they could re-institute the special district if only Disney would behave like a good little puppet for DeSantis' political ambitions.

But the Republicans are risking a lot on this brash and open assault on a major economic revenue source for the entire state. If Disney World is curtailed, shut down, reduced in any way, that's a serious hit to the surrounding hotels and restaurants responsible for the hotel and sales taxes flowing into Tallahassee. 

One noted effect of losing the special district status is that Disney would have to fire the county-level emergency services people - the EMTs, the fire fighters, the police - working within the district. The district itself disappears, meaning the counties it's in - Orange and Osceola - would have to pick up the slack and staff those services themselves. Those counties would start have to paying for all that, not Disney.

Adding on top of that is a bond liability Disney has tied into the Reedy Creek finances, a massive debt worth around $1 billion (it might even be $2 billion) that those counties - not the state, which is really rubbing it in hard - would have to cover. If we refer to that CNBC article by Robert Frank:

Reedy Creek has bond liabilities of between $1 billion and $1.7 billion, according to the district’s financial filings. Under Florida statute, if Reedy Creek is dissolved, those liabilities are transferred to the local governments — either Bay Lake or Lake Buena Vista, or more likely, Orange and Osceola counties.

State Senate Minority Leader Gary Farmer, D-Fort Lauderdale, tried to amend the bill to include further study of the bond debt, but the amendment failed on a voice vote.

Farmer said the bond debt could total more than $2 billion and that tax authorities are increasing their estimates as they learn more about Reedy Creek’s outstanding liabilities.

“This is a very real impact, the extent of which we don’t fully understand yet,” Farmer said.

If the liabilities of $1.7 billion or more are transferred to Orange and Osceola counties, he said, the debt could amount to $1,000 per taxpayer...

In short: If Reedy Creek goes, the state government gets all the money while the local counties are forced to pay the bills.

All of this damage happening all because DeSantis and his fellow Republicans are vindictive assholes.

This is only part of the stuff that can happen if (more like when) DeSantis gets his revenge on Disney.

What happens when the Walt Disney Company, megacorporation generating around $68 billion a year, decides to fight back?

Remember at the beginning of the article when I mentioned my family moving to Florida? We moved to the Tarpon Springs area, and during those early formative years I witnessed up close the Disney company going after a day care center right off Klosterman Road. The day care had painted on the exterior a number of kid-friendly cartoon characters, among them Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Disney did not approve, because they were not affiliated to that day care. I didn't fully understand as a kid what trademarks meant and "controlling the brand" was all about, all I knew was a big business in Disney was going after a tiny local business on the side of the highway.

What I learned back then was something a lot of people understood over the decades that Disney turned into the media behemoth it is today: You do not fuck with Disney. You NEVER fuck with Disney. They go after day care centers, for God's sake.

This is an international company, with a reach extending to nearly every country on the planet. They hire hundreds of thousands of workers at theme parks across the globe. They make movies and television shows every minute of the day. They own the franchises of nearly every cultural foundation - their own animated characters, Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, they just bought 20th Century Fox a couple years ago to seize the X-Men characters for future MCU planning - of modern fandom. They only things they don't own are Star Trek and Dr. Who, and Gods help us if they ever buy those up.

And they have on staff hundreds of lawyers all working to ensure protection of their trademarks, to brush aside lawsuits and damage claims, with a ruthlessness that would impress Sith Lords.

In terms of this retaliatory - and rushed - law DeSantis is about to sign, Disney can easily send an army of lawyers to poke enough holes in the law to where the courts - even the Republican wingnut ones - can invalidate it. 

On top of the legal fight about to ensue, Florida Republicans ought to start realizing that Disney - and a number of Disney's corporate allies - may not be sending fat checks to their campaign war chests, which is an important thing this midterm elections cycle. It wouldn't be logical of Disney's CEO to help pay for a political party that just kneecapped him and stripped one of the most profitable pieces of Disney's corporate empire of its power.

While businesses may think the Republicans are the "Pro-Business" party, what DeSantis and the Florida GOP just did demonstrated that when it comes to pandering to the voting base on culture war issues, the Republicans will sacrifice and abuse their corporate "buddies" for cheap political points. Republicans, it turns out, are NOT really Pro-Business: Republicans are Pro-Power, and they are not going to share that power with anyone...

Would Disney roll over on this issue? I wouldn't expect them to: Show DeSantis or any other bullying politician that you're willing to cave, and all the other state governors and elected officials will pile right on. So I would expect Disney to take stock of the state political landscape, take a deep breath, and begin funding Democratic candidates - especially the centrist Pro-Business ones - with truckloads of SuperPAC funds and ad support and voter turnout efforts.

For all the gerrymandering the state Republicans have done, they are still vulnerable to voter turnouts (DeSantis barely won in 2018 by little over 3,000 votes). This stunt the Florida GOP is pulling is about to hit the wallets of hundreds of thousands of residents - and not just in Orange and Osceola counties - in a way that they'll view as unforgivable. No amount of culture war fearmongering can distract from families coping with higher property taxes and lost jobs.

If the Florida Republicans are kneecapping you with punitive laws to make you suffer, you fight back to make sure those Republicans are out of office by the next election (which is this November).

And that's all the LEGAL stuff Disney can do to punish DeSantis for starting this culture war fight. You might expect some of the illegal stuff like literal kneecapping to happen over the next couple months.

In the meantime... well, in THIS fight between Wingnut Assholes vs. Corporate Overlords, I'm gonna have to side with the Corporate Overlords. 

#GoDisney 

and #SayGayFlorida