Disney quietly dodged DeSantis’s oversight board, appointees realize

DeSantis’s Disney oversight board says loophole stripped them of power - The Washington Post

The Disney World oversight board installed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) accused the previous board of passing an 11th-hour agreement in cahoots with the entertainment giant that has hamstrung it from much of its administrative power over the Florida amusement park.

In apparent retaliation for the critique, DeSantis replaced the previous Disney-friendly oversight board known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District with a new board, the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, made up entirely of his own appointees, including religious and conservative activists. The board is responsible for approving infrastructure projects, as well as maintaining more mundane aspects of the park, such as trash collection and management of sewer systems. Disney would have been to some degree beholden to DeSantis’s board for its sign-off on major projects, in theory allowing it to hold sway over the company.

But in a bureaucratic coup, Disney and the previous board signed an agreement on Feb. 8 — the day before the Florida House passed a bill paving the way for the DeSantis appointees — that transferred much of the board’s power to Disney.

The new board, much to its chagrin, apparently discovered the agreement only recently.

“I’m surprised that they didn’t tell us about it as soon as we were appointed,” one of the board members, Brian Aungst Jr., told local station News 6 as the board held a meeting on Wednesday. “We had to find out about it late at night on a Friday night.”

Ron Peri, another board member, said at the meeting that under the agreement, “this board loses, for practical purposes, the majority of its ability to do anything beyond maintain the roads and maintain basic infrastructure.”

The oversight board was created in 1957 when the state, in coordination with Disney, created a special tax district for the park that had similar powers to a county government in an effort to free the park from some state-level bureaucracy. DeSantis, who has repeatedly criticized Disney since it came out against his education policy, said in his February announcement that he was ending Disney’s “corporate kingdom” and “preferential treatment.”

So, with a DeSantis-aligned board looming, the previous board granted Disney broad veto powers over any improvements or changes to properties in the park, according to a copy of the agreement published by the Orlando Sentinel. Under the measure, any changes are “subject to [Disney’s] prior review and comment,” so as to “ensure consistency with the overall design and theming” of the park.

The board was also prohibited from using Disney’s name or characters — “such as Mickey Mouse” — or distributing or selling Disney-related merchandise.

The agreement invoked a so-called royal lives clause: It is valid in perpetuity, or if forever is deemed to be too long, until the “death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, King of England living as of the date of this Declaration.” Such clauses have been employed for centuries as a workaround for restrictions on agreements in perpetuity.

The board has retained Cooper & Kirk, a conservative D.C. law firm, to challenge the agreement. An attorney at the firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Disney said “all agreements signed between Disney and the District were appropriate, and were discussed and approved in open, noticed public forums,” according to the Associated Press.

Disney and DeSantis’s office did not respond to requests for comment.