an acid legal dispute between the ultra-conservative governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, and the Disney corporationhas brought to public scrutiny an extraordinary situation that has existed for more than half a century: the existence of a private state within a state, Florida, where the Disney corporation supplied the government in an area of 100 square kilometers where it is located disneyworld. But it also shows how a ruler who does not accept criticism responded with reprisals, generating a climate of polarization and, perhaps, economic damage to the state.
Disney World is at the heart of the dispute between DeSantis and the Disney Company, which is the world’s largest media and entertainment company. They are two powers facing each other for more than a year, but it escalated last week Disney suing the governor for retaliating for opposing his law, known as “don’t say gay”. The lawsuit, for what it means for Florida’s economy and for next year’s presidential election, has been front-page news in major US newspapers in recent days.
Disney World is the largest employer in Florida, employing 75,000 people and paying $1.146 billion a year in state and local taxes, more than the budget of several Mexican states. The economic flow in the Magic Kingdom, to which credited with driving the modernization of Florida, generates 463 thousand additional jobs. DeSantis, in turn, is considered Donald Trump’s top contender for the 2024 presidential nomination, and his highly ideological stance isn’t necessarily rejected.
His action against Disney is not negative per se, because of the way the brothers Walt and Ron Disney built a state within a state, but it is tainted by its origin: criticism of the company, pressured internally by its sexually diverse workforce, to the law of Rights of Parents in Education, popularly called “don’t say gay”, approved by the Florida Senate in March of last year despite criticism for banning instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in the primaries, supported by DeSantis, whose anti-LGBTQ agenda is well known.
The response was brutal, for the Magic Kingdom, whose planning in 1967 sought to eliminate what had happened at the company’s first theme park, Disneyland, in Anaheim, in the Los Angeles suburbs, which was an immediate success, by creating a ideal world that delighted children and adults. But outside its walls, not only hotels and restaurants were installed, but also some black twists, such as prostitution.
Walt Disney thought not just in an amusement park much larger than Disneyland, but in An Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, known as EPCOT, which is the most visited park in the Magic Kingdom, and which was originally going to be a city called Ciudad Progreso, which crystallized into a residential area called Celebration, with immaculate care in its streets and gardens, where the properties They are connected to swimming pools, golf courses and kilometers of bicycle paths, where “the values for a community that seeks to maintain first-class standards and services that appeal to all types of families” are promoted. Celebration reproduces the old American dream so driven, with ideological objectives, in Walt Disney’s tales.
To make it, lobbied the Florida Senate for a self-regulation system on his property, where the gardens play as a limit to prevent the Magic Kingdom from being in the middle of businesses that was not what Disney dreamed of to encourage escapes from reality and aspirationism. In this way, he managed to create the Reedy Creek Improvement District that it gave it almost full autonomy within its borders.
That law allowed Disney to assume the role of municipal authority over the two counties where Disney World is located where the company, not the authority, set land regulations, building codes, control over water, its treatment and drainage, in addition to gas and electricity service, construction and maintenance of roads and bridges, as well as its own fire department and emergency medical services. The Reedy Creek District also had its own elected officials and municipal agencies.
Despite the fact that over the decades there has been criticism of this unusual model, the tourist success and the economic benefit overshadowed all the questions, until last year, when DeSantis’s political and ideological intolerance confronted him with the company and he began to dismantle what was known as “the District”. In April of last year, the Florida legislature abolished “The District” and all similar ones with special tax treatment created before November 1968, a clear dedication against the Disney company.
Instead it created the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, which last February gave the governor the authority to appoint members of the Oversight Board, stripping home and condo owners within the Magic Kingdom, which for years did so through democratic voting. The law will enter into force next June, and it is what the Disney company is fighting with the lawsuit it filed last week.
What will happen to what we know as Disney World? For a tourist it will hardly be noticeable what happens. Its four theme parks, its two water parks, its sports complex, its two cities and hotels with more than 40,000 rooms and more than 300 restaurants will continue to operate. But In the bowels of the conflict, it will be seen whether, due to its economic impact, Disney will be allowed to continue as a government on a piece of land under his control, or DeSantis, with a crusade for the authority to reclaim his legal functions, uses the very visible confrontation, for his political purposes.
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