Another Version of the Disney Bill Would Have Let DeSantis Accomplish His Political Goals Without Trampling on Free Speech or the Florida Economy

Photo by Matt Stroshane/Walt Disney World Resort via Getty Images.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and the Republicans in the Florida Legislature could have fought their culture war against Mickey Mouse without worrying about the myriad legal challenges and complaints from Central Florida taxpayers who don’t want to foot the bill, if they’d just been a little less aggressive in their bill drafting.

The bill DeSantis signed last week eliminating the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID), the special taxing district operating on the Walt Disney Company’s 25,000-acre parcel in Central Florida, has been sharply criticized as a violation of the First Amendment for retaliating against Disney’s criticism of the Parental Rights in Education bill (deemed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by its critics), a catastrophic burden on the taxpayers of Orange and Osceola County, and in conflict with existing Florida law. But a different version of the bill that was introduced by Florida State Sen. Gary Farmer (D) would have allowed DeSantis to accomplish his political goals without invoking all these free speech, local government law, and economic issues.

Farmer told Mediaite it was “absolutely insane” to repeal RCID, and for all the wild details I would encourage you to check out my deep-dive analysis into RCID and the consequences of the bill published here at Mediaite last Thursday, but essentially Florida law does not allow local governments to treat taxpayers differently — they must all be taxed at the same millage rate — unless a special taxing district is created with the consent of the landowners within that district.

Contrary to many comments I’ve seen on social media and from the supporters of the bill, it’s inaccurate to describe RCID as a “tax break” for Disney. RCID was created to levy additional taxes on Disney property to pay for the infrastructure they wanted, and has the highest millage rate in the entire state of Florida, even higher than Miami. Disney pays property taxes to Orange and Osceola County and then pays an additional tax to RCID, plus the sales taxes and tourist development taxes they collect and remit to the state.

Currently, RCID oversees a large array of functions including building permitting, water and waste treatment, trash and recycling pickup, construction and maintenance of roads and waterways, fire and emergency medical services, landscaping, environmental protection, and utilities like natural gas and electricity.

When Disney purchased this large swath of rural land in the 1960s, neither Orange nor Osceola County governments had the capacity to provide the needed infrastructure for the development. While much of Osceola County outside of the tourist corridor remains fairly rural, the city of Orlando and much of Orange County is far more metropolitan today, but neither county has the interest or staff and financial resources to take over RCID’s functions.

The terms of the bill DeSantis signed targets “any independent special district established by a special act prior to the date of ratification of the Florida Constitution on November 5, 1968, and which was not reestablished, re-ratified, or otherwise reconstituted by a special act or general law after November 5, 1968,” which includes RCID and a single-digit list of some other special districts, and states that they will be “dissolved effective June 1, 2023.”

In other words, RCID will cease to exist in about 13 months, unless a court strikes down the law or the legislature comes to their senses and reverses themselves. The legal and economic ramifications are massive and devastating, eliminating potentially tens of thousands of jobs in Central Florida (both those RCID employs directly and the many people employed by RCID’s outside vendors) and transferring RCID’s bond debt to the counties (which forces the taxpayers to take over payments). Orange and Osceola County will incur hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in attorneys’ fees to navigate the complex studies, negotiations, and new contracts and regulations needed to take over RCID, establish a new legal structure similar to RCID under the powers allowed to county governments, or some hybrid of those two.

None of these consequences seem to have weighed upon the minds of DeSantis, Florida State House Rep. Randy Fine (R), or State Senator Jennifer Bradley (R), the bill’s sponsors in the House and Senate respectively. A source at RCID confirmed to Mediaite that no one from the governor’s office nor any Republican member of the legislature had contacted them before this bill was passed. When I started making calls to research last week’s article, employees and elected officials in both Orange and Osceola County expressed their complete shock about the bill and confirmed that no one had reached out to them beforehand.

“It’s absolutely insane that we would undertake such a consequential piece of legislation without knowing what the full impacts would be,” State Sen. Farmer told Mediaite in a phone interview, calling the proposed repeal of RCID “monumental,” bringing up several of the issues discussed above.

Farmer lambasted the bill’s sponsors for their lack of understanding about how RCID functioned and was specifically frustrated about how the bill had not been released until the morning of the first day of the special session. The minimal debate during the three days of last week’s special session was “not even close” to the kind of due diligence needed, he said.

Using his background as a Florida Bar-licensed attorney and work from his “incredible staff,” Farmer put together an amendment that sought to find a compromise. His amendment would have replaced the bill language repealing RCID and the other special districts and instead directed The Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability (OPPAGA) — the “research arm of the Florida Legislature” — to “conduct a study to determine the full impact on state and local governments and the private sector” if that same list of districts were dissolved. Under Farmer’s version of the bill, OPPAGA would have been directed to begin this research work immediately, with a December 31, 2022 deadline to submit a report on the findings to the President of the Florida Senate and Speaker of the Florida House.

“This is exactly the type of thing that OPPAGA exists to do,” explained Farmer. In fact, OPPAGA conducted a study on RCID in 2004, induced by the Comcast Corporation’s attempt to purchase Disney at the beginning of that year. Comcast’s takeover bid failed, but it “raised legislative concern about the impact of a transfer of primary landownership within [RCID],” specifically how another corporate owner might use or take advantage of the district’s functions and authority.

OPPAGA’s report went into detail about the authority granted to RCID under the statutes, its current functions, and potential areas for further consideration or reform. The agency’s findings reassured the legislature that a potential new owner would be constrained by multiple legal authorities, contractual agreements, and general economic incentives from straying from RCID’s public purpose:

OPPAGA determined that RCID is subject to many federal and state regulations that would help ensure that it continues to meet its public purpose, regardless of primary landownership. This oversight, in addition to agreements that RCID has with the local governments that have land within its jurisdiction, should discourage any departure from fulfillment of the objectives and purposes for which the district was established and provide protection against sudden and significant changes within district boundaries. In addition, it appears that any new owner would be constrained by best business practices from making drastic changes to land use within RCID.

The nearly total lack of due diligence by DeSantis’ office or any of the repeal bill’s sponsors or supporters has been a core complaint of the bill’s critics, including this reporter. Farmer’s amendment would have initiated the exact type of study prudent lawmakers would want before attempting to make even the tiniest changes, much less attempt to dissolve, a half-century of billions of dollars of infrastructure development and economic impact.

When the initial call for the special session was announced to include RCID, many observers assumed that the legislature intended to order this sort of OPPAGA study, with the clearly implied threat of taking punitive action against RCID if Disney didn’t back off from criticizing the parental rights bill.

It’s not hard to envision how that could have played out. A bill calling for an OPPAGA study of RCID would be far more resistant to a First Amendment challenge in court, even though the retaliatory motivation would still exist. How do you argue the legislature shouldn’t study the legality and functions of an entity created by its own statutes?

The GOP-controlled House and Senate could have adopted Farmer’s amendment, sent it to DeSantis for signature, and campaigned for their own re-elections this fall on a promise of government transparency and holding Disney accountable to the people of Florida. There are currently over 1,800 special taxing districts throughout the state of Florida; RCID is one of the oldest and broadest, but it’s not unique. A study of this type of legal entity might be helpful to have a knowledgeable discussion about how they should be regulated and enacted moving forward. That’s a fair debate to have.

But pigs get fat, and hogs get slaughtered, the saying goes. The Republicans got greedy, rushing forward with this bill that is viewed by many as intentionally inviting a lawsuit. The cynical theory is that DeSantis and his Republican allies wanted to score culture war points against the “woke California corporation,” but are perfectly fine with a court cleaning up their mess — after all, that then lets them add screeds against the “liberal activist judges” to their campaign rhetoric.

As for Farmer, he’s highly skeptical RCID will be dissolved, citing a statutory conflict (an existing law prohibits the legislature dissolving these kind of districts unless they go inactive or the voting landowners consent) and the bond issue I wrote about yesterday.

“Mark my words,” said Farmer, declaring that RCID would never be dissolved and calling the bill “a petulant, punitive, political payback against Disney for daring to say that the emperor has no clothes” and “a distraction from the racist congressional maps [the Republicans] passed.”

“It’s an unmitigated power grab,” Farmer concluded. “I’ve called it extortion. This is not how we’re supposed to legislate.”

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.