Team Rodent - Carl Hiaasen [7]
Today Virginians still argue about whether the megadevelopment would have been a blessing or a debacle. It’s undeniably true that some folks would have gotten rich, because that’s what happens when Mickey comes to town. It’s also true that lots of folks soon would have found their town unrecognizable: congested, noisy, tackified, and tourist-trammeled. As for the Manassas battlefield memorial, the six-mile distance would have provided no buffer whatsoever from the Disney outfall. One hundred miles is too close, if the desired atmosphere is a dignified quiet.
Good for all those people who fought back against Team Rodent. It was about time somebody did.
Enough Orlandos, already.
Republic of Walt
IN THE MID-1960s farmers, ranchers, and other rural land holders in central Florida began receiving inquiries from prospective buyers. The offers were fair, though not high enough to attract suspicion. Even at $200 an acre, most owners were happy to sell. The transactions seemed routine, and it was a while before folks realized what was happening.
By then, roughly twenty-four thousand acres had been acquired in methodical quilt-patch purchases by Walt Disney Productions. Realizing that the price of land would have shot up if his involvement were known, Walt Disney had kept his role a strictly guarded secret. The payoff was an incredible real-estate coup that eventually would transform forty-three square miles of pastures, woods, and swamps into the world’s most popular tourist destination.
Walt died five years before Disney World opened, but its future was secure. That’s because Florida’s legislators blitheringly agreed to give the company virtually whatever it wanted, and the main thing it wanted was autonomy: a private government for constructing and managing an amusement park. Thus was born the Reedy Creek Improvement District, an innocuous-sounding title that belies unheard-of powers. “The Vatican with mouse ears,” says Richard Foglesong, a Rollins College professor and longtime Disney watcher.
Reedy Creek takes in all the land purchased by Walt’s secret agents in the 1960s. The district is “governed” by a supervisory board elected by the landowners, meaning the Walt Disney Company. Its borders contain two shell municipalities, Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake, which have a combined permanent population of fewer than fifty souls, mostly company executives and their families. Everybody in Orlando knows that Reedy Creek is Disney and Disney is Reedy Creek, although for legal reasons both claim to be separate. That’s because Florida requires municipal governments to conduct their business in public, and for competitive reasons Team Rodent would rather not.
Never before or since has such outlandish dominion been given to a private corporation. Disney runs its own utilities. It administers its own planning and zoning. It composes its own building codes and employs its own inspectors. It maintains its own fire department. It even has the authority to levy taxes.
Florida’s starstruck lawmakers didn’t stop there. They also gave Disney’s puppet government the authority to build its own international airport and even a nuclear power plant—neither of which the company has needed … yet. Reedy Creek is further empowered to have cemeteries, schools, a police department, and a criminal justice system—services that Disney has so far chosen not to assume.
Reedy Creek does, however, “contract” with Disney for an eight-hundred-member security force that patrols Epcot, the Magic Kingdom, hotels, shops, restaurants, and roads—everywhere on company property. The “hosts” and “hostesses” wear blue uniforms and carry badges, just like real cops. Legally they’re not, although they sometimes forget.
Two friends of mine, Charlie and Cheryl Freeman, once took their son and daughter to Church Night at Disney World. They went on a bus with seventeen other children and several parents. Charlie drove.
Outside Tomorrowland, the Freemans had a run-in with another group of youngsters on an escalator. The kids