Your assuming that the scale of the project would have remained the same without the concession from the District. That's not a safe bet when the company was being run by Budget Cuts Bob. A smaller scale refresh was certainly a possibility.
Certainly things could have changed in design, but to present it like DS wouldn't have happened at all.. and get no benefit from the redevelopment... is not real either.
So let's put it in real context... DS was going to happen. The future community benefits you tout were going to happen if DS was a success. Does Disney build one garage instead of three (like the original leaked plans showed). Is the community benefit radically lessened? Are people not coming to DS because of that?
It all boils down to 'was it necessary?' - I advocate no.
It's an acceptable "loss" if the alternative is worse. If the project was scaled back to reduce capital expenditures then there would be less sales tax revenues for the state and counties in the long-term.
You omit that the county and state didn't even get to make this decision or determination. They are get to accept the consequence. The District's revenues are based on property, not sales tax. So you wanna compare what nearly $100 in district capex looks like vs decreased property taxes on what 'downsizing' Disney might have done and the ROI on that? I can tell you without even doing the napkin math.. that's not a good ROI.
Again, it was cited as an example of why RCID was bad. If you don’t understand that then I can't help you. Citing it as a reason to change the District's Board means that we have to assume that such a deal wouldn't have been done if the District never existed. That's clearly incorrect, so feel free to dislike the policy or the logic behind it all you want but don't pretend that it's not relevant to the conversation you joined.
'joined'? been here since the start. What I interjected here is when people tried to deny Disney's role and benefit to having work completed as public works.
'why RCID was bad' is an interesting take. The statement made by the user was:
"
Examples of why it should be reformed:
1) The RCID does not allow the hundreds of thousands of individuals that live near it to participate in its management
2) The RCID and Disney became intertwined and it impacted good governance
3) Disney shifted CapEx from its balance sheet to the local government apparatus, thus obscuring true CapEx"
None of those statements are incorrect. Yet posters went onto claim they were, in particular #3.
The statements on their own are factual - The disagreement is over do they bother you... and if you are ok with that status quo.
The counties made the decision to accept these types of "losses" decades ago when they supported the creation of RCID to save themselves and their taxpayers from the burden on helping foot the bill for the infrastructure required to develop WDW.
So now, the answer to any criticism of the district is 'you reap what generations before you sowed'?
Should we make the same claim everyone should accept CFTOD's decisions blindly because that's what the state created?
The county didn't agree to giving up property taxes when RCID was created, nor did it sign up to some notion of lack of government independence.
And if the argument is don't say "don't complain about the extra money I'm giving you just because it could have been more in some alternate reality" then you have to acknowledge the possibility that there's an alternate reality where there is LESS money being given
I have no problem with the belief that Disney would have solved their parking problem even without the help of the district. Same way they manage to find a way to pay for it everywhere else.
It was a completely unnecessary concession.