Today was interesting for Disney and Florida. It was mostly interesting in that we had confirmation of something often suspected but never revealed until today.
As the Reedy Creek Improvement District situation continues to unfold, Fox News Digital has reportedly obtained internal emails that show that Disney lawyers may have drafted the agreement handing over developmental authority from the alleged residents of Reedy Creek over to the Walt Disney Company for a span of time after the death of a descendant of King Charles III of England.
The move might have been intended to thwart attempts by the government of Florida to dissolve RCID and replace it with the new Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. The emails, which were read aloud at a CFTOD board meeting on Wednesday of this week showed that Disney lawyers then suggested that the name of the drafters be changed from John McGowan, Walt Disney World Resort’s chief counsel, over to someone else in order for there to be better “optics.”
Ron DeSantis stated that The Walt Disney Company and RCID are attempting to “usurp the authority of the CFTOD board” and that “they [Disney] are not superior to the laws that are enacted by the state of Florida… they thought they could create a development agreement that would render everything we did null and void. That’s not going to work, that’s not going to fly.”
In the end, the name of the drafter was changed to that of John Milgrim of Milgrim Law Group. It is not known if there will be any legal consequences for the change itself, but it is notable that a previous record request by the state of Florida for any correspondence between RCID and TWDC regarding resistance of the dissolution of Reedy Creek “yielded no results” according to several news outlets.
Stay tuned here to That Park Place for additional coverage as this situation develops.
