News Reedy Creek Improvement District and the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District

[Lilofan]

Has anyone seen any news reports with an updated comment from Disney? Honestly, the only legitimate concern I have is the potential lack of notice given to affected property owners. If that is true, that development agreement may not be worth the paper it’s printed on.

IMO, nothing else comes close to level of damage that mistake would do.

Last I read some top PR execs were getting laid off from Iger advance warning to cast on company layoffs in April. Could be a delay in getting a company response.

 

[drnilescrane]

I'm trying to figure out when the legislature will have the time. The session ends soon, and they still have a budget to pass.and change the law to allow DeSantis to stay in office when he runs for POTUS.

 

[mmascari]

The current inspection law is based on number of employees, so just pick a number between Uni's employee numbers and Disney's

When the rule is "If you're bigger than X you don't have to do Y", it's easy to get out of Y by being bigger. Hard to restructure and look bigger.

When the rule is "If you're bigger than A you have to do B", it's not that hard restructure into logical distinct but separate legal entities and keep you size smaller than A.

If whatever B requires is seen by Disney as being onerous, I can imagine they'll restructure on paper so that each theme park is its own thing with less employees. Contractual relationships between entities to keep everything working. If it's really onerous and the number is small enough, you could even break EPCOT in two to get the number down.

Then, it's a race to change the law and keep moving the number smaller vs including other companies vs the desire of each to reorganize into smaller legal units. All at some cost of money that is just waste to change the legal paperwork.

Anyone who has ever worked for an organization with a holding company and working companies within is already familiar with this. People forget until they do stuff like apply for a mortgage and remember the name on their paycheck isn't who they say they work for. You'll end up with people who say they work for "Walt Disney World Park" but really they work for "EPCOT World Showcase LLC".

 

[Stripes]

Not yet, but I wouldn't expect any potential statements from the Company to address the issue of notice specifically, especially since it was the District's obligation to send the notice, not Disney's.

True, it was the districts responsibility. But Disney released a public statement that specifically mentioned that the agreement complied with sunshine laws requiring noticed, open forums. If the forum was not properly noticed as required by Florida law, then Disney’s public statement is a lie. I think Disney should respond.

 

[Brian]

True, it was the districts responsibility. But Disney released a public statement that specifically mentioned that the agreement complied with sunshine laws requiring noticed, open forums. If the forum was not properly noticed as required by Florida law, then Disney’s public statement is a lie. I think Disney should respond.

We'll have to wait and see if anyone can pony up the receipts. Generally, notices as crucial as these are sent via Certified Mail so there is court-accepted proof of mailing. Otherwise, a sworn statement from the person/people responsible for the mailing, affirming they mailed them, would likely be the next best thing.

 

[Tha Realest]

Standing is one issue.

The other is HB9 itself, which lists the consequences of not doing the mailing, is that ... there are no consequences:

View attachment 710898

House Bill 9 suggests it’s a bill, not a statute. Does this language appear in any existing statute under Florida law?

 

[Tha Realest]

We'll have to wait and see if anyone can pony up the receipts. Generally, notices as crucial as these are sent via Certified Mail so there is court-accepted proof of mailing. Otherwise, a sworn affidavit from the person/people responsible for the mailing, affirming they mailed them, would likely be the next best thing.

Does an email to TWDC suffice a notice?

What about the company town “landowners” that were selected by TWDC to be owners as a condition of their fealty to the company? Did they get mailed copies of the agreement beforehand?

 

[mmascari]

Isn’t the land owned by RCID either already used for utility or road services or preserved wetlands?

You could bulldoze the solar field and replace it with housing. Isn't solar power woke too?

If that's too much, perhaps convert a parking garage into housing. Think of the short commute to Disney Springs!

 

[mikejs78]

True, it was the districts responsibility. But Disney released a public statement that specifically mentioned that the agreement complied with sunshine laws requiring noticed, open forums. If the forum was not properly noticed as required by Florida law, then Disney’s public statement is a lie. I think Disney should respond.

We'll have to wait and see if anyone can pony up the receipts. Generally, notices as crucial as these are sent via Certified Mail so there is court-accepted proof of mailing. Otherwise, a sworn affidavit from the person/people responsible for the mailing, affirming they mailed them, would likely be the next best thing.

As @lentesta pointed out above though, failure to mail to the landowners is specifically called out in FL law as not providing standing to nullify as long as the meetings were properly noticed.

 

[Lilofan]

You could bulldoze the solar field and replace it with housing. Isn't solar power woke too?

If that's too much, perhaps convert a parking garage into housing. Think of the short commute to Disney Springs!

That solar power field is the biggest hidden Mickey that I can think of.

 

[mikejs78]

House Bill 9 suggests it’s a bill, not a statute. Does this language appear in any existing statute under Florida law?

HB9 was the Reedy Creek legislation that was passed in February.

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

My guess is the number not going because of politics is very low. Probably a few on the extremes who feel they went too far/not far enough but that’s it. Probably true of the states also, probably a few extremes who won’t go to FL (or CA) because of the states politics but I suspect it’s a very small number.

No one forgoes going to Disney parks due to politics. They have data on that too. Some say they do…but they are lying.

I was initially very excited about a DeSantis run thinking he’d give us a more traditional Rep option than DT, sadly that excitement is gone. Two sides of the same (horrible) coin.

Miss read that one. Some days you get the bear, and some days the bear gets you…

 

[Patcheslee]

Don't know if was posted or not, but what the heck, a second time never hurts.
The RCID BOS page has an updated agenda for the meeting on Wednesday. It was updated today prior to the press conference.

Link to the BOS package for April 19: https://www.rcid.org/document/4-19-23-bos-meeting-package/

No surprise, a lawyer that help write legislation is hired to help.

 

[Brian]

As @lentesta pointed out above though, failure to mail to the landowners is specifically called out in FL law as not providing standing to nullify as long as the meetings were properly noticed.

Which would leave us with the governor's next avenue of chapter 163, section 3241 of the Florida statutes as a legislative means of dissolving the contract.

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

You could bulldoze the solar field and replace it with housing. Isn't solar power woke too?

If that's too much, perhaps convert a parking garage into housing. Think of the short commute to Disney Springs!

…now you’re thinking…time to make it GREAT again!!

 

[Stripes]

Standing is one issue.

The other is HB9 itself, which lists the consequences of not doing the mailing, is that ... there are no consequences:

View attachment 710898

As @lentesta pointed out above though, failure to mail to the landowners is specifically called out in FL law as not providing standing to nullify as long as the meetings were properly noticed.

I’m fairly certain that what @lentesta shared does not apply to a development agreement.

 

[mmascari]

I included a map from RCIDs website. It sits in the boundary, but is unincorporated RCID

So did I. That was a picture from https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=b1a5e8be7c2a4b2e93f7c41196f48149

It clearly shows that south of Western Way (where I believe all the actual housing vs just retail is located) is outside the current boundary.

 

[thomas998]

Standing is one issue.

The other is HB9 itself, which lists the consequences of not doing the mailing, is that ... there are no consequences:

View attachment 710898

The problem is that you are looking at this one piece of legislation as if it is the only thing that controls the matter. If Florida is like most states it will have other legislation that can come into play which could impact the validity of what the board at Reedy did. I was involved in another state where a local government decided to ignore normal open meeting laws in the state and tried to hide behind some rules that the local government had drafted. The entire mess slogged through the courts for more than 2 years before a judge undid what the city council had done. I don't think anything is going to happen very quickly in this instance because both side seem to be hellbent on digging in and not giving up on anything. But given the Governor has already mentioned he's ready to build a prison near Disney I think it might be time for Disney to back off before things get really bad for them. I can see it now, Florida builds a special prison for sex offenders on one side, a halfway house on the other... maybe it is time for me to sell my Disney stock and buy share of Universal.

 

[lazyboy97o]

House Bill 9 suggests it’s a bill, not a statute. Does this language appear in any existing statute under Florida law?

HB 9 is the law that reconstituted the district.

 

[mikejs78]

Which leaves us with the governor's next avenue of chapter 163, section 3241 of the Florida statutes as a legislative means of dissolving the contract.

That's not going to be an easy thing for them to do.... The problem is whatever they do that would essentially invalidate the contract would likely have repressions throughout the state.