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Florida‘s Republican lawmakers have passed a bill to strip a special district status that Walt Disney World has been allowed to operate on its properties in the state for more than five decades.
Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed for the bill to be taken up during a special session after Disney publicly declared its opposition to a new law backed by the governor that critics have dubbed “Don’t Say Gay.”
Disney in March suspended political donations in the state and vowed to push for the law’s repeal. DeSantis shot back by calling the company a “woke corporation” trying to influence state affairs. “If we want to keep the Democrat machine and their corporate lapdogs accountable, we have to stand together now,” DeSantis wrote in a fundraising pitch sent on Wednesday.
The passage in the Florida House by a vote of 68-38 came the day after the Florida Senate passed the measure by a vote of 23-16.
The special status, known as The Reedy Creek Improvement Act, was signed into law in May 1967 by Gov. Claude Kirk in response to lobbying efforts by Disney. The entertainment giant proposed building a recreation-oriented development on 25,000 acres of property in a remote area of Central Florida’s Orange and Osceola counties, which consisted of 38.5 square miles of largely uninhabited pasture and swampland.
Orange and Osceola County did not have the services or resources needed to bring the project to life, so the state legislature worked with Disney to establish the Reedy Creek Improvement District, a special taxing district that allows the company to act with the same authority and responsibility as a county government.
Some critics contend that the Florida Legislature can’t unilaterally dissolve Reedy Creek. Under state statutes on planning and development, a majority of a district’s resident electors must approve dissolving their special district.
“This is another example of petty, punitive and performative politics by Governor Ron DeSantis,” Democratic state Rep. Anna V. Eskamani said. “He’d rather deflect and distract from the fact that he’s erasing black minority districts from Florida’s congressional maps and ignore real life problems because that’s appealing to his political base. Meanwhile, every day people are struggling to make ends meet in our state. It’s disturbing to see his political ambitions supersede the needs of the state.”
Disney has not responded to requests for comment as of yet.
