Prior board members were gifted acreage by Disney within Reedy Creek and chosen exclusively by Disney for decades, but now’s the time to get concerned about conflicts of interest.
The sentence context here conveys that this gift created a conflict and that it is bad. But, is that really true?
It's true that Disney made the gifts. With conditions and restrictions. It was clearly done to satisfy the requirement that board members owned property within the district. Something no longer true.
Beyond that, did it have any value? Was there some secret pay off hiding in the arrangement? Were those board members able to use that gifted property in some way to enrich themselves? If they stopped being a board member, did the gift allow them to enrich themselves then?
Or, did it just solve the technical problem to meet the requirement of owning land that had no value to anyone besides Disney and where Disney retained the right to acquire it back from them if they were no longer a board member?
If we changed the sentence to "Prior board members were given id badges by the constituents within Reedy Creek and chosen exclusively by those constituents for decades, badges they had to return if they left, but now’s the time to get concerned about conflicts of interest." Would that change the implications at all?
I would assume, but don't really know, that if the prior board was directly investing in competitor theme parks outside the district, that would have created a conflict at the time to worry about.