Conservative media cheering DeSantis crackdown on Disney are ignoring what a catastrophe it would be for Florida

“I will not allow a woke corporation based in California to run our state,” Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) declared in a recent fundraising email, and this week his war on Disney moved from rhetoric to retaliatory regulation, as he pushed for a bill in the current special session that would dissolve Disney’s Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID). He seems poised to declare victory as the House and Senate have both passed the bill, but this effort marks a reversal of not only long-held conservative principles of protecting free speech and private property rights but also threatens to unleash colossal economic devastation on Central Florida’s local governments and residents, with impacts rippling statewide. Disney is the state’s largest employer, with Walt Disney World employing nearly 80,000 people, with a payroll of over $3 billion, plus those employed by the Disney Cruise Line ships departing from Port Canaveral and Miami. Mickey is the multi-billion dollar fuel for the economic engine of the entire state; it’s the magnet that draws in visitors to other area attractions and hotels. We can avoid a state income tax largely because of hotel and sales taxes collected from the more than 100 million people who visit the Sunshine State each year.

To research this article, I consulted public records and spoke with numerous experts around the state including attorneys, law professors, land use and development professionals, Florida tourism industry professionals, former Disney employees, elected officials, and county government employees. Many asked to remain anonymous due to the highly charged political atmosphere surrounding this topic. My sources ranged all across the political spectrum but universally expressed shock at DeSantis and his GOP compatriots mounting such a blatant assault on free speech. Many raised concerns about the thoughtless speed by which the bill moved forward, and the havoc they expected its unintended consequences to wreak in a state dependent on tourism revenues. “They’re just making shit up,” was the blunt reaction from one Central Florida political insider. HB 3C (along with an identical companion bill in the Florida Senate that passed on Wednesday) is a deceptively simple one-and-a-half page bill that eliminates independent special districts that were enacted before the 1968 Florida Constitution, unless the legislature moves to reauthorize them. That cutoff point just so happens to include RCID and five other much simpler special districts.