You’d think so. But there’s nothing in these documents to show it. In fact, they’re pretty mediocre - something that a lightweight would prepare. They’re missing a lot of what you would want in them to protect Disney - just basic stuff, like what a “major theme park” actually is, or how many parking spaces they required/allowed to have for such a facility.
I suspect that the opposite might be true. Disney’s basically been exempt from modern Florida zoning laws. They’ve controlled their own city government since the opening of the park. So they’ve pantomimed having a zoning code and getting development approvals from a reviewing agency. But it’s just been them reviewing and approving their own projects, wearing a different hat. I actually doubt there’s anything clever in the old Disney documents - because Disney’s never had any real need for someone who knows what they’re doing in the zoning and development approval field.
If Disney is kneecapped then the company has to say enough is enough and move state.
Iger is not going to get blamed for that. Disney World as a property was depreciated a long time ago. Disney can find any state in the union willing to give them a deal.
The Governor in question would carry that burden especially in Florida.
This game of chicken will be seen all the way through. There is not a CEO in the nation that wants Iger to backdown one iota.
I agree you have a lot of ways from Sunday for Disney Florida to be shutdown. I think it will happen. This is just business. Good luck cleaning up the wreckage for the gov. The upchuck is going to stink.
Problem is, most of the states with the weather Disney wants, to maximize the season, have governments close to that of Florida. The one reasonably safe place is California, and they are already there.
CA is definitely a good place for it. The reason is CA is so large two locations would drive more tourism. The sites could be 500 miles apart easily.
Central Florida is going underwater. Iger may be looking to leave Florida in the longer run anyway. In fact Disney knows they have to leave.
I do not understand who buys a condo in Florida with the waters rising. In fact there is nothing in Florida to leave to the next generations.
We had Foxwoods for over a decade in CT before Mohegan Sun went in as the second casino. At that time business just went higher and higher for both of them. Now with online gambling that is not true.
Any part of CA is a long way from the rest of the country. When baseball teams traveled by train, rather than airplane, there were no major league teams on the west coast, because of the travel time. When I went to Disneyland in 63, it was part of a 3 week road trip. According to Google Maps, I could make Orlando, from Detroit, in 17 hours, almost a straight shot down I-75. To Anaheim? About 35 hrs.
What amazes me is, given it is in the middle of the state, its only 89 feet above sea level. It won’t go under, but that is an amazingly flat state. However, Florida is a swamp. If the sea waters get closer to Orlando, what does that do to ground quality?
Disney’s invested billions in the parks. And the hotels, and the transportation infrastructure, and their retail center (Disney Springs). And in developing a workforce of tens of thousands. And benefited from decades of symbiotic growth of hotels, convention spaces, and other tourist and traveler-serving industries that aren’t operated by Disney but contribute to Orlando’s suitability for a four-theme park, two-water park resort.
You can’t move that. Not in any timeframe that’s relevant to the political issues they’re facing, at least.
That is why the Gov thinks he has leverage to whip Disney into line with his ideology.
Thing is, Shiny “JCs” have been abandoning major capital investments all over the US, for decades. Schwinn plant in Chicago, Zenith plant in Chicago, plenty more. The Chrysler Belviderel plant that just closed was only 6 years older than Disney World. Yes, Disney World is larger than any one of them, but taken together, abandoned industrial property in the US probably represents Trillions in investment.
6001 W Dickens Ave, Chicago. I watched the Apollo 11 moon landing on a Zenith TV built here.
Disney doesn’t want to shut down their Florida theme parks, which are vastly more important to their operations than six Wal-Mart stores. Wal-Mart can easily make the strategic decision to close a few of their 5,000 U.S. locations without materially affecting operations. Shutting down the Walt Disney World Resort is a whole 'nother story.
Nor would shutting WDW down for a while teach a lesson to the bureaucrats. The bureaucrats aren’t elected - they’re appointed by the governor. And he apparently doesn’t care whether Disney is happy or not. Probably with good reason - he doesn’t depend on Orlando-area votes for his political success, and he gains enormously from fighting with Disney.
DeathSanta is appointed? Nope. He is the BIC (Bureaucrat InCompetent). And HE faces the axe by voters if the Florida economy gets even a sniffle, never mind a full-blown economic depression.
Not as much as you’d think. Most of those abandoned industrial properties have depreciated to the point of being worth very little - by the time an industrial manufacturing plant gives up the ghost, it’s probably had years and years of minimal-to-no maintenance or upkeep (much less re-investment) as the owner amortizes all of the value out of it.
The Disney parks (and hotels and retail facilities and other ancillary capital) are constantly being maintained, refreshed, updated, and invested in. Completely different kettle of mice. It would take several decades of letting them slowly decline in order to amortize that value out the way these old plants slowly rotted - and that would be so unbelievably damaging to their brand it’s probably not really an option.
A good point. Disney is constantly rebuilding sections of it’s parks to leverage it’s latest movie “franchise”. DIS could simply stop investing in Florida. Let the park run down. Put all the cool new stuff elsewhere. There are sections of DW that are abandoned now.
I though you were referring to the RDIC board - “bureaucrat” is not typically used to refer to governors or legislatures, but the folks who staff agencies and boards.
De Santis just got re-elected - and is now term limited. He doesn’t care if his antics cause Disney to suffer heartache - or even some regional economic issues. The Orlando area isn’t where his voters are - Orange County is one of the few counties he lost in 2022, and by double-digits. It’s like thinking Greg Abbott would be reluctant to damage the Austin area economy.
If Disney decided to set fire to a few billion dollars in revenue just to spite De Santis, it would devastating to the Orlando area - Disney employs nearly 80K people there. But it would have much more modest effect on the broader Florida economy. It might knock state GDP growth down a bit, and it would push our unemployment rate up a point from 2.6 to somewhere close to 3.5 - but not enough to really undermine the statewide economy.
There would be massive problems with doing that. These are customer-facing facilities. If you let the parks and hotels and other amenities run down, you’re going to massively damage the brand.
I agree with albaby that it isn’t practical for Disney to move. There is a huge infrastructure there. It might be easier to move San Francisco to Oklahoma.
A shutdown makes no sense to Disney, but a moving some admin and creative employees out of state might catch folks attention (they tend to be the highest paid).
That’s why I think Disney’s goal is to tie this up in the courts until DeSantis terms out (King Charles III notwithstanding).
The rest of my thoughts on this are political, so forbidden on this board. Wendy scares me.
By run down, I mean nothing new. Just the same old rides, decade after decade, leveraging long ended movie “franchises” with obsolete F/X. Or, do what some Shiny managements have done: sell the complex to another company, and let them let the place run down, to maximize short term profit. The state of Florida would probably shower incentives on a prospective buyer that reflected the state’s “values”.
They’re actually in the middle of doing the opposite of that. They’re working on moving a bunch of jobs out of California to a new campus being built outside of Orlando (not under the jurisdiction of the RCID 2.0):
Now - that’s certainly something they could cancel, in protest, if they wanted to. But that kind of small measure is unlikely to meaningfully sting the Governor, and instead is more likely to disappoint the local elected officials who Disney still very much would like to have be supportive of them.
