The battle between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Disney has escalated to a point nobody probably saw coming, with the presidential hopeful threatening to build a state prison on land adjacent to the Walt Disney World property.
“People are like: ‘What should we do with this land?” DeSantis said during a particularly unhinged press conference. “People have said maybe create a state park, maybe try to do more amusements parks, someone even said, like, maybe you need another state prison. Who knows? I just think that the possibilities are endless, so that is now going be analyzed to see what would make the most sense.”
To be clear, he is talking about land that was operated by the former Reedy Creek Improvement District, a governmental body established by Disney in central Florida in the late 1960’s. The arrangement was established, in part, to woo Disney away from a competing project in California (the never-built Mineral King resort). For half-a-century the Reedy Creek Improvement District oversaw the construction of roads and other infrastructure in the sprawling compound, as well as maintained a fire department and other essential services.
All of this changed when Disney publicly disagreed, after a bungled and much-maligned period of quiet indifference, with DeSantis’ so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. That’s when DeSantis decided to openly wage a campaign against Disney, which climaxed, earlier this year, with the dissolution of the Reedy Creek Improvement District and the establishment of the eerily similar Central Florida Tourism Oversight Board, stocked with DeSantis acolytes (including Ron Peri, a goofball former pastor and the CEO of The Gathering, a Christian ministry in Orlando, who claims that homosexuality is caused by tainted drinking water).
Of course, DeSantis’ lofty ambitions for the Central Florida Tourism Oversight Board (really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?) came crashing down when he realized that measures passed right before Disney handed the district over to Disney, will severely hamper the new board’s abilities to do pretty much anything to impact the company’s current plans for the resort. It was legally sound and quickly led to Donald Trump, DeSantis’ rival for the presidential campaign, mocking him for getting outwitted by Mickey Mouse.
“They thought they could create some kind of development agreement that would essentially render everything we did null and void and put them in control for perpetuity,” DeSantis raged during the press conference. “That’s not going to work. That’s not going to fly.”
Now, DeSantis has pledged to make Disney rides, shows and attractions (as well as its monorail line) will be subject to state inspections. And, you know, threatening to build a state prison in land adjacent to the resort. “If you look at this whole special district, Walt Disney Corporation obviously owns a lot of it, but the district owns other land.”
The press conference was full of weird jabs at Disney, including DeSantis’ questioning the morality of the MagicBand technology that the parks utilize and an outdated mention of the original Reedy Creek agreement, which would have allowed Disney to build a nuclear power plant which, if they had any intention of doing, would probably have happened in the past 50 years. There was, of course, also objections to Disney’s woke agenda, a common refrain from the far right. Also important to remember that DeSantis got married in Walt Disney World. Whew, boy.
You can watch the full press conference at the top of this post (if you dare).
