There has been much made in the past few weeks about the Reedy Creek Improvement District and the ability for Disney to self-govern using it. Now that it has an expiration date looming (one which will no doubt be tested in courts and negotiated behind closed doors), there has been significant focus on taxes and who will face the one to two billion dollars in bond liabilities that Reedy Creek has held. Will the friendly citizens of Orange and Osceola Counties be faced with a huge wave of debt?
Well… not so much if things go as they probably will in the court system. You see, Reedy Creek Improvement District is managed by two cities. For Disney, these cities were supposed to be real places with real people when they first moved into Florida and set all of this up. However, with the passing of Walt Disney, the company veered away from their original experimental prototype city of tomorrow. Instead, the idea was to keep the city and district powers by maintaining them at the lowest necessary level possible, but focus almost entirely on leisure instead. Disney would get the best of both worlds: city and district government power with basically no citizens to cause any problems.
Fast forward to today and you can see why Disney may be staying very quiet in the present moment. They have a bigger mess on their hands than anyone in the press is talking about. Today’s information is the sort of thing you only get at a place like That Park Place.
Take a look at the information for the City of Lake Buena Vista from the Reedy Creek website:
Now take a look at the City of Bay Lake:
Notice anything odd?
Well for one, isn’t it strange that the City of Bay Lake would always meet with their City Council in a different city? And for another, how is it that two different cities would hold their City Council meetings in the same building, in the same room, on the same day, thirty minutes apart? Is there never any public input from residents in these meetings? Oh… and look at that… both “cities” have the same clerk: Tina Graham.
But it gets even more weird. Would you think it might be a bit shady if the District Administrator for all of Reedy Creek Improvement District is also the City Manager for Lake Buena Vista? That’s pretty nifty for John Classe, eh?
All of this is to say that Florida granted Disney power over two cities, then Disney changed their minds and kept the cities while not running them like they’re real cities at all. Nobody but Disney owns property in these cities and Disney controls who lives there. Just so you can have a visual for how ridiculous all of this is, here are all the homes and citizens’ abodes of the “City of Lake Buena Vista“:
As you can see, all of this is a farce that is kept going at whatever the absolute bare minimum is to maintain city “status”. For decades Florida has looked the other way, but the problem for Disney now is that with Reedy Creek dissolved, these cities are far more exposed. And if Florida will go after their special district, they might go after the cities… and that’s where all the power lies. But the much, much bigger problem for Disney: what if all that debt goes to the two cities that managed it? Each one of those homes just got hit with millions upon millions of liabilities. Disney owns every single one of them.
Ouch.
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