 Once upon a time, a man named Walt wanted to build a city, nay a kingdom in Florida Swampland. As you can see on this map, we have a perfect location in Florida, almost in the very center of the state. In fact, we selected this site because it's so easy for tourists and Florida residents to get here by automobile. The company secretly purchased 27,400 acres in small parcels that together formed a land mass roughly the size of Manhattan. As you can see on this master plan, the theme park and all the other tourist facilities fill just one small area of our enormous Florida project. He wanted plenty of space to keep the type of tacky tourist shops that encircled Disneyland, plopped in the middle of Anaheim, California, from encroaching on his new kingdom. There's enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we could possibly imagine. Disney filmed this presentation in a bid to convince lawmakers that his extraordinary dream required extraordinary powers. He wanted total control over the land so that politics couldn't interfere. The heart of everything we'll be doing in Disney World will be our experimental prototype city of tomorrow. We call it Epcot. Epcot's Dynamic Urban Center will offer the excitement and variety of activities found only in metropolitan cities. I call it a Vatican with mouse ears because it's like the autonomous government that the Vatican has. Though he passed away in 1966 before the plan came to fruition, Walt Disney got his wish. The year following his death, local lawmakers approved the creation of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, a remarkable experiment in private governance that has thrived for the past 55 years. Enter Governor Ron DeSantis. Disney should not run its own government. In March, Disney CEO Bob Chapec issued an internal memo stating that the company opposed a law that was recently passed in Florida, banning instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in K-3 public school classrooms. DeSantis, whose office didn't respond to our interview request, reacted by dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District as of June 1, 2023, which would bring this half-century experiment in semi-privatized governance to an end. Walt Disney's project was inspired by the futuristic vision of the 1964 World's Fair, overseen by his personal friend, the New York power broker, Robert Moses. The company had showcased future Epcot attractions such as the People Mover and Carousel of Progress. It later hired the fair's executive vice president to oversee the construction of Disney World. Disneyland California became a social center, a center of national and international tourism, according to Austrian-born LA-based urban designer Victor Grün, who was also the visionary behind the indoor shopping mall. He called it a prime example of cellular urbanism, where a dense, pedestrian-friendly central business district is the heart of the city, with arteries running into it from the outer residential and recreational areas. Walt Disney, who reportedly kept a copy of Grün's book, The Heart of Our Cities On Hand, wanted his experimental prototype community of tomorrow to be a showcase of the first true cellular city. The broad green belt and recreation lands. And finally, the low-density neighborhood residential streets. Disney World had a profound influence on urban planning. For one thing, it inspired planned communities and attractions throughout Florida, which has more than 1,200 special governance districts. While Epcot never became the functional city of 20,000 residents that was promised in Disney's film presentation, the company did build and maintain a vast transportation infrastructure, including a monorail system that carries about 150,000 guests a day connecting with a network of buses, shuttles, trams, cable cars, and boats to move guests between its four theme parks, two water parks, shopping and recreation centers, sports complex, campground, and more than 29 resort hotels. Disney World's governance model was also influential as a strategy for dealing with the red tape endemic to local planning boards. Robert Moses exemplified one model of circumventing local politics. He never held elected office, yet remade the landscape of New York through his control of the state's powerful public agencies and powered to borrow money and seize land through eminent domain. But the flip side was that Moses had little accountability, so he bulldozed neighborhoods and nearly flattened Manhattan's Soho with an expressway. The need is not just procuring the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on Virgin Land and building a special kind of new community. While Moses ran roughshod over established communities, Disney opted to build a new economy in central Florida on Virgin Land with his strategic real estate purchases and special district exempting him from the politics of zoning and land use regulation. The result was a more effective model of governing land use. Because the Reedy Creek Board is appointed and funded by a company with an incentive to create a highly functional design, the project met the needs of its customers while keeping costs in line. Epcot will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise. Disney has benefited from the Reedy Creek Improvement District because it gets to control everything and the awesome authority that the Disney Company has put those two things together, creativity and control. Historian and political scientist Richard Foglesong is the author of Married to the Mouse, Walt Disney World and Orlando, a definitive history of the Disney Corporation's relationship with Florida's government. He says that the company's special jurisdiction insulated it from interference from county planning departments. That's what made Disney World's distinctive architecture possible. They were building Cinderella's Castle, 278 feet high, made of fiberglass and you wouldn't find a provision for that fiberglass tall building in a building code. But that didn't mean skimping on safety. Disney hired a nationally recognized building code expert, as well as the former Army Corps of Engineers General who'd been the former governor of the Panama Canal Zone to oversee Disney World's construction. They wanted to make sure that the tourists who come here are safe, otherwise they might sue. So there was a financial incentive for the Disney Company to conduct its inspections responsibly and they weren't sure they would get that from a municipal government. Legally, Reedy Creek started as a special drainage district so that the company would have the municipal authority to empty the swamp that it planned to build over. But it morphed into a full-fledged government with its own fire department, hospital, water and power systems and even the right, though never exercised, to form its own police department. It even had the authority to build a nuclear power plant within the district, which it never pursued perhaps because that would have invited onerous federal regulation. What's remarkable is how fast Disney's dream came together. The company transformed 2,500 acres of undeveloped swamp land into the Disney World complex in just four years. The Magic Kingdom opened to the public on October 1, 1971. Disney World inspired future experiments in private governance, including a variety of attempts to build charter cities run by private corporations in Central America and African countries with the goal of spurring economic growth by preserving personal liberty. But Walt Disney was adamant that no permanent citizens reside in Reedy Creek. Because they well understood that if people actually lived in the Reedy Creek Improvement District that they would be able to vote there and Walt didn't want that. They wanted planning and zoning authority but not at the cost of having real residents who could vote there. Disney did create two adjacent residential cities, Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista, with a combined population of about 53 permanent residents. residents who get to elect the local government officials. Voters must own an acre of land in the district to participate in the Reedy Creek elections. Now you might wonder, who are the people who live in those residences? Answer, they are trusted long-term Disney employees. So those are like company towns and those are employees beholden to the company. It makes it possible to do things that would not be possible in a real world community. Disney was so protective of Reedy Creek's autonomy that when former CEO Michael Eisner created the residential city of celebration on the property in 1996, he actually de-annexed it from the Reedy Creek Improvement District prior to residents moving into their homes so as not to risk the intrusion of politics. In 2013, Honduras, a country hobbled by bureaucracy, corruption and weak property rights passed a national law authorizing private cities which paved the way for several attempts to build autonomous zones protected from local politics. But after the election of the democratic socialist Xiomara Castro earlier this year, the government repealed that law undermining the charter city movement. And this underscores one of the hazards of building private cities. Their autonomy is vulnerable to the whims of populist politicians from the left and the right. They don't want to see their kids go to kindergarten and have this stuff jammed down their throats. And so I just stand with the people. I stand against a lot of media and a lot of big corporations. DeSantis signed the Parental Rights and Education Bill into law in March, 2022 amidst a national media firestorm. Critics call it the don't say gay bill. Florida's so-called don't say gay bill legislation that is designed to target and attack the kids who need to support the most. Disney has vowed to help have Florida's don't say gay bill repealed. The law prohibits any classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K through three, and instructs that the subjects only be taught in older grades in an age-appropriate manner, as determined by the State Department of Education. Disney, a famously LGBT-friendly company, responded to employee complaints about corporate silence with a letter from CEO, Bob Chapec, issuing an apology for his silence, calling the bill a challenge to human rights, promising to donate corporate funds to combat similar legislation in other states and pause all political donations in the state of Florida. DeSantis and his allies in the state legislature then targeted Reedy Creek. Reedy Creek gives them a competitive advantage that their competitors do not have. State Representative Randy Fein introduced the bill in the Florida House that would end the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Disney announced they were going to use the special privileges that the state had given them to make it a priority to repeal a bill that we never passed. They supposed don't say gay bill. We thought that was a little bit out of line, and that created this groundswell of support to start to take a look at things like this. Reedy Creek does grant Disney some advantages beyond streamlining, zoning, and building codes. The district can issue tax-exempt bonds to finance infrastructure improvements on the property, and Disney doesn't incur the same improvement fees when it develops its land that other companies operating under traditional governance do. But the company covers the cost of its own municipal services by paying more than $100 million a year in taxes to Reedy Creek on top of the property taxes it pays to the counties, and it reimburses the local sheriff's department for its presence on the property. Focal Song says Walt Disney wasn't after tax breaks. The Reedy Creek Improvement District is a special taxing district, and through it, the Disney company, believe it or not, taxes itself to be able to produce particular public services and build particular infrastructure that are specific to its own needs. It didn't wanna have to rely on Orange County like it relied upon Anaheim, California. It wanted just the things that it needed for its purposes and was therefore willing to tax itself to get them. The company clearly wants to retain those powers. I think not so much to have power, not because it's money saving for them, but rather because it produces efficiency for them. What has been going on here is I believe companies have been able to be bullied. Woke leftists have just simply bullied them, screamed and yelled and thrown temper tantrums, and so companies go, what's the path of lease resistance? Fine, fine, fine, we'll throw you a bone. Well, they're now learning in Florida, there's a cost to doing that. In the United States, shouldn't a private citizen, even if he's the CEO of a big company, feel free to criticize government policy without facing retaliation? Well, I reject the premise that it was retaliation. For starters, when you treat every company the same, that cannot be retaliation. If we were treating Disney worse than its competitors, you would argue that it would be retaliation. But when you kick the hornet's nest, sometimes issues pop up. If it's an unfair treatment for Disney, why not look to expanding and creating more of these special zones? Do you think that is something worth considering or was this ultimately a mistake? Well, I mean, I think you can take some of the things that are good and grant those without creating a special zone. Disney has created $1.1 billion of taxpayer debt. I don't know that there's a matter of good public policy that private corporations should be able to issue government debt. That's about as far away from a free market as it gets. But unlike normal municipal bond debt that's repaid through taxation, Redi Creek's bonds have been backed by the revenue of the Disney company. Though that could change if the district is dissolved. The Orange County tax collector estimates the dissolution could lead to a 15 to 20% property tax increase in the county to compensate bondholders for Redi Creek's more than $1 billion in debt and to cover the millions of dollars of annual expenses in maintaining the property's infrastructure. I don't see how the governor and Republicans in the state legislature are going to be able to finalize this step to dissolve the Redi Creek Improvement District and not leave taxpayers and voters having to compensate the Disney company. Fine says that Orange and Osceola counties could set up their own special taxing districts to target Disney and make up for the shortfall. And DeSantis has suggested absorbing Redi Creek into the state government to continue extracting Disney's money. Focal song expects that Disney in the state of Florida will reach a compromise to save Redi Creek before the June 2023 deadline. I think there are too many benefits and you might say too many children for this divorce to occur. The Redi Creek Improvement District, in my opinion, is something like a prenuptial agreement that protected Disney's powers into the future. Walt Disney died and they ended up building amazing theme parks and an amazing tourism destination but they never built a city. So one could argue that the marriage was created on false pretenses. You said that this is not retaliatory but it is clearly sending a message. There's a message, is that kind of the relationship between corporate America and government that we wanna see going forward? We're not interested in getting in the way of free speech but when a visitor to our state says we are going to use special privileges that we've been given to retaliate and get rid of a law that we never passed, that's a slap in the face to the people of Florida and we're not gonna put up with it. I mean to call Disney a visitor to the state, they've been here for over half a century. Are they really, they're kind of a staple of Florida, aren't they? But that's what we learned that Disney was acting like a visitor. They said we demand that you accept our California values in the state of Florida. A Florida company wouldn't have done this. If Reedy Creek is dissolved, what's the legacy of Walt Disney's Dream City built from scratch on a Florida swamp? I think there are gonna be unintended consequences and I think they're gonna be great. I think if I was considering building a theme park in the state of Florida, I would go gosh, do I wanna compete with a company that gets special perks and privileges that I don't get. It's true that no other company was ever able to secure the kind of autonomy that Disney did in Florida. Even though it may annoy politicians, resentful of giving up their control over a large swath of land, Disney has created a model of land use studied worldwide by businesses and governments. The Reedy Creek Improvement District in its half century of life so far has offered a glimpse of what's possible when land development is governed by a private company with a long-term stake rather than the political whims and interests of elected officials. Disney World is, in many ways, a city dedicated to free enterprise without residence true, without democracy, but with a reliance on a private corporation to efficiently provide public services. So it is kind of amazing that self-described conservatives now would wanna take away from a well-known and pretty beloved company the ability to privatize public services and to deregulate and rely more on the private marketplace. I'm confident we can create right here in Disney World a showcase to the world of the American free enterprise system. I believe we can build a community that more people will talk about and come to look at. than any other area in the world. We're ready to go right now.