Disney vs. DeSantis: How Did the Reedy Creek Improvement District Come to Be?

The Disney vs. DeSantis feud has been long documented and has been overtaking headlines for a long time now. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis kicked off things by threatening to and then acting on dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District board and replacing it with the Central Florida Tourism District board. But Disney pulled an ingenious maneuver with their King Charles clause in the agreement they signed with the Walt Disney Company, which in turn led to the CTOFD board voiding the agreement. Of course, when this happened, Walt Disney World filed a suit against Governor DeSantis, and now the hand-picked board has sued Disney back.

It’s certainly no understatement that a lot has happened. But what is the Reedy Creek Improvement District, and how did Disney even come to have its special permissions?

 The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow

EPCOT, when it was first proposed by Walt Disney, was meant to be more than a Theme Park. As reported by Slate, he wanted it to be “an experimental planned city, a utopian company town that would serve as a ‘blueprint for the future,’ where residents would test out new products, no one would be unemployed, and the city’s climate-controlled center would cater to pedestrians who could be ferried about by monorail. ”

Because at the time, Florida wasn’t the sprawling state with a developed economy that it is today, Walt Disney was able to make demands of the state in terms of what kinds of permissions he’d need to make this city happen. Since Walt Disney needed the authority to create and run a city, the state of Florida gave him all the necessary permissions to make this happen. Then, Walt Disney’s death meant that the city never came to pass, and the company moved on.

But recent reports indicate this isn’t true.

Richard Foglesong & Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando

Richard Foglesong is a former professor at Rollins College in Orlando, Florida, and in his 2001 book, as Slate reports, ” Instead of evidence of serious plans for the development of an idealized city, he found a warning from a lawyer that such a development could threaten Disney’s control of the land.”

As Walt Disney realized that he couldn’t actually realize his dream of a city as real residents would end up bringing the same external control that he was trying to avoid, he ended up canning the dream before it started. Foglesong recalled in an interview, he saw that “someone had written NO in inch-high letters.”

“I took that memo to the archivist in the Disney Archives, and I asked whose comments these were,” Foglesong said. “The archivist said, ‘That’s Walt Disney’s comment.’ Every place in the memo where the attorney referred to the property of real residents, Walt Disney had written, between the lines, ‘temporary residents/tourists.’ So, in this planning memo, Walt is telling the attorney, ‘We’re not going to build a place with residents.’ ”

All in all, Foglesong revealed that the dream city that Walt Disney was rumored to have wanted to build was swept under the carpet quickly, and considering that was the very reason for Disney to demand the special permissions for the Reedy Creek District, and since it was acquired in “ingenious but dishonest” means, the former professor is not against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis‘s actions.