Team Rodent - Carl Hiaasen [6]
Beyond the rare movie flop, Disney is unaccustomed to failure. It prizes its reputation for profitability almost as much as its reputation for wholesome entertainment. No other company so zealously endeavors to live up to its own hype—and manages to come so close. Success after success has turned Team Rodent into a ravenous, fearless beast, and that’s why many of us now cheer those infrequent occasions when it is rebuffed, humbled, or gored.
Bull Run
DATELINE: HAYMARKET, VIRGINIA, November 1993.
For many months the Walt Disney Company has been anonymously snapping up property in the Piedmont, just as it did many years ago outside Orlando. This time, though, Disney’s got something different in mind: a 150-acre amusement park with a history theme, to attract day-tripping tourists from Washington, D.C. Also in the works are a campground, a golf course and resort, twenty-five hundred new residential homes, and a boggling two million square feet of office and commercial space. The three-thousand-acre, $650 million development is announced with fanfare and the promise of many new jobs—and within months comes under blistering attack from all over the country.
The outcome proved genuinely historic, though not in the way CEO Eisner foresaw. At issue was the proposed theme park’s proximity to the Manassas National Battlefield, scene of the battles of Bull Run. Although the nucleus of Disney’s “America Project” was to be six miles from the Civil War memorial, many Virginians felt it was close enough to be a desecration. This time it wasn’t Nature but American history that Disney sought to polish up and market as a fun ride. Opponents said Manassas was no place for a massive theme park/golf resort/subdivision, and predicted the surrounding hillsides would be ruined by the same type of tacky runaway sprawl that had surrounded Walt Disney World. The rape of Orlando was invoked constantly as a battle cry.
Another sore point was money, specifically taxpayers’ money. Disney attorneys had nonchalantly demanded more than $200 million in state funds for new roads and highway improvements around the park and office complex. Meanwhile the residents of Prince William County would be expected to contribute another $75 million for water, sewage, landscaping, and other necessities. “It was not a request, it was not respectful and it was confidently stated,” recalled Prince William County executive Jim Mullen, writing in Public Management magazine.
He and other planners visited their Florida counterparts to quiz them about how Team Rodent operates. “Arrogant, demanding, aloof, confident, efficient, powerful, successful and profitable were the words used to describe Disney,” Mullen reported. But in Orange County, as in Prince William, the prevailing view was that government was wise to make Disney comfortable, even if groveling was required; anything less could jeopardize an economic windfall for the community. So Mullen and his colleagues began working nonstop to improve Disney’s master plan in ways that all sides might find acceptable. The task would prove impossible in the face of a growing outcry from environmentalists, Civil War historians, and nearby landowners, some of whom had influential political connections.
Despite the resistance, in March 1994 the Virginia General Assembly approved $163.2 million in benefits for Disney. Almost immediately a citizens’ group filed two lawsuits in an effort to halt the America Project. Eisner assured the Washington Post that the Walt Disney Company was solidly committed to its northern Virginia theme park: “If the people think we will back off, they are mistaken.”
They weren’t mistaken. Three months after Eisner’s vow, Disney backed off. The company was taking a publicity beating worldwide and could not overcome the perception that Mickey and Minnie soon would be dancing on the graves of Civil War heroes. So, only days after $130 million in road-building funds had been authorized for the America Project, Disney decided