As we all know, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took revenge on Walt Disney Co. last year after its CEO dared to criticize DeSantis's anti-gay stance. Unfortunately for DeSantis, he didn't really think things through.
First he decided to get rid of the special assessment district that Florida granted to Disney World back when it was first built. But it turned out this would reduce Disney's taxes a bunch and transfer them to the God-fearing residents of Orlando. Oops. So recently he signed a bill that reinstated the district but allowed him to appoint all its directors. Checkmate!
Not quite. Michael Hiltzik tells the story:
DeSantis handpicked a board of cronies to take over control of Reedy Creek Improvement District — the quasi-governmental entity that Disney and Florida established more than 55 years ago to control development and management of the land on which Walt Disney World, EPCOT and the company’s related enterprises are located.
DeSantis’ board has now revealed that, while they were snoozing, Disney executed an agreement with their predecessors that strips the new board of all its powers except the authority to “maintain the roads and maintain basic infrastructure,” according to one of the new board members.
Hilariously, the agreement Disney reached will remain in effect at least until 21 years “after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, King of England,” currently living. More on this delicious provision in a moment.
Foiled again. But what's this stuff about King Charles? Well, the law doesn't allow you to make changes like this in perpetuity, so you have to tie it to the lifetime of someone currently living.¹ The youngest spawn of King Charles III probably have 80 more years ahead of them, which gives this agreement a 100-year lifespan. And since their lives are the most minutely recorded vital statistics on the planet, there should be no argument about whether any of them are alive at any given moment.
But wait. It gets better:
I *guarantee* that the Disney lawyer who suggested this stratagem remembered it not from law school but from the 1981 movie "Body Heat," set in Florida, starring Wm Hurt & Kathleen Turner, the plot of which turns on Hurt, a lawyer, having messed up the Rule Against Perpetuities. https://t.co/00cou0NVT4
— Eric Redman (@ricredman) March 30, 2023
Technically, I probably don't approve of Disney's legal shenanigans. But in this case I think it's a fair competition between two powerful actors hellbent on destroying each other. Go Disney!
¹Oddly enough, I know about this because my own grandfather tied his will to the lifetime of my sister, who was his youngest relative at the time of his death. If the law had allowed it, he almost certainly would have made his instructions permanent.²
²In the end, his efforts to control things from the grave came to nought. He didn't foresee the inflation of the '70s, which steadily began eating away his entire bequest. For that reason, a judge allowed my family to get the terms of the trust broken.
Good for Disney. Democrats everywhere should also be doing this in lame duck sessions to strip powers away from incoming Republicans… just like how Republicans are doing it to incoming Democrats in NC, WI and elsewhere. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
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I hope Trump sends him a signed copy of the "Art of the Deal".
The Republican base doesn't want smart. They want hateful and vindictive. They actively hate smart people.
I believe it was Hannah Arendt who observed that authoritarian regimes will always collapse under their own incompetence because what they value is slavish loyalty, not brains or capability.
There's just one problem with what Disney did: it won't work.
FL Statute 163.3241 requires the modification or revocation of any developer agreement if it conflicts with a subsequently enacted state law. HB 9-B replacing RCID with the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District was enacted two days after this developer agreement and it specifically listed all the powers the new board has. The only part of the old agreements which is likely to survive is the restrictive covenant on the use of Disney intellectual property because that was never awarded to the District in the first place.
Anyway, the developer agreement never even touches the part where Disney is really vulnerable, which is the District's control over permits. For really obvious reasons, Disney didn't propose RCID grant Disney the right to issue permits to itself. And in Florida you need a permit to do everything from replacing a hot water heater to putting up a tent to repairing a roof.
I’m not sure that any of this really matters. Ultimately, Disney is going to build what it wants and do what it wants. If the DeSatan board members don’t like it, I don’t see what they can do about it without potentially damaging the entire Florida economy.
Plus,, my guess is that even in Florida, Disney’s a lot more popular than DeSatan. Were I him, I’d avoid making an enemy of The Mouse.
So this is a big business Democrat?
That's a misreading of the statute. Directly from the statute:
The state law does not preclude the Board from following Disney's changes to its development agreement.
I would invite you to review Florida’s case law on its impairment of contract prohibition. It’s quite robust. HB-9 must yield to the state constitution.
From Above the Law, you have missed the most delicious item
https://abovethelaw.com/2023/03/disneys-lawyers-are-better-than-ron-desantiss-lawyers/
"'The old board GAVE PUBLIC, CONTEMPORANEOUS NOTICE OF ALL OF THESE AGREEMENTS. If DeSantis could’ve been bothered to stop yammering to every cable news outlet about stopping the woke mob, he might’ve sent some lawyers to do something about these deals. But he slept on his rights — or more accurately the rights of the puppet board he planned to install — and the deed is now literally and figuratively done."
You can't out-Mickey Mouse the Mouse.
Disney has an entire building full of lawyers. Their business empire depends on them.
To put it more delicately, it ain’t easy to ratfuck the Mouse.
Of course, when the Mouse uses his aptitude and cunning in other ways, people get up in arms…
This whole thing is a shitshow.
Disney never should have been able to purchase being its own local government.
Puddin' of course only tried to take that way because Disney had the gall to treat gay people as humans, and is being a fascist jockstrap because that's who he is.
Personally, I'm just rooting for injuries. They deserve each other.
"Disney never should have been able to purchase being its own local government." This is not uncommon. And one must remember that Florida wasn;t much better off than Mississippi before Disney moved in. They are still one of the poorest states in the country.
The lesson: A big company, especially one owning an important tourist destination, is likely to have had some combination of luck and crafty lawyers to get the better end of the deal.
Take, for example, the Guinness company in Dublin, whose founder, Arthur Guinness, back in 1759 (264 years ago), signed one of the longest and (ultimately) cheapest leases in history.
More about it here:
https://www.historydefined.net/how-the-guinness-brewery-signed-a-9000-year-lease/
Look, another example about how Trump's ability to speak out of his ass is not as easy as it looks.
1. As if DeSantis had any idea of what taxes Disney paid, or didn't pay, vs. not having a special district. Trump has mastered the art of talking about made up crap, not real policy. Sorry Ron, back to class for you.
2. So, acting without a clue, he revokes status.
3. Finding out it raised taxes on other MaGA idiots, he reverses.
4. He appoints a new board. Of course, this board's only purpose is to troll Disney.
5. Disney actually accomplishes, via contract, provisions to keep the nonsense down.
The knucklehead who is talking about how this thwarts the will of the people has no clue over what his supposed job even is, let alone whether this thwarts anything, that I would bet on.
The rule against perpetuities language is fun though, I must admit.
If I had to speculate, by the way, the reason Disney World needs a special assessment district is that it is so large, and so unlike a normal community where hardly anyone lives there, its almost like those various "Cities of Industry" where its an incorporated city but 100% commercial. It would not automatically follow that Disney has a great deal when it comes to taxation, although they might.
For what it's worth, I think DeSantis is smart. However, he doesn't actually care about the governance of the Reedy Creek Improvement District.
He cares about getting his soundbites and news coverage. So many of the things he has done are performative in this way, and have way less substance than they appear to have, or how it is discussed on media.
I think he's a lot smarter than someone like MTG, who also engages in over-the-top rhetoric knowingly. She says outrageous things because it drives media coverage and fundraising. She's whale hunting.
That doesn't make me dislike DeSantis less, by the way. It's kind of worse to flog bigotry as an electoral tool. It's not like he's doing much of anything about the problems he's "fighting".
As ever, it's understanding that classic distinction:
Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom is not putting one in a fruit salad.
I entirely agree that DeSantis is clearly intelligent. He's just not very wise.
Exactly. As a PhD geneticist, it's been my observation that the traits of high intelligence and good judgement are unlinked.
See Musk, Elon
If you had watched him debate Andrew Gillum, you would not think DeSantis was smart.
If a person's action influence the lives of other people that the person cares about, the person is wise. If a person's actions influence the lives of other people that the person doesn't care about, the person is the opposite of wise, which is ignorant.
You can't tell how smart an ignorant person is by their behavior toward the people that they don't care about. Even if they look stupid, they might be smart. You can tell how smart a person is by their behavior toward the people they do care about.
A comment about the footnotes (so you can skip if you don't care). My grandfather's will was structured so my step-grandmother (who he married after being widowed in his seventies) got the income of his estate which were dividends from a single pharmacology small company and, after her death, the capital was divided amongst his grandchildren. A some what risky deal for my step-grandmother but she (and I) where lucky in that the drug company servived and became part of one of the largest drug companies in the world.
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What is truely amusing about this is how it inverts what republican legislatures have been doing when the party loses statewide elections.
About time.
What is evident is that Democrats and Republicans are playing entirely different games. Republicans believe whole heartily that America is under attack and any methods to defend are a means to an end. There are no rules in their war, there is only winning and protecting.
The way I understand it is Disney wants the kind of first rate infrastructure they get in California while getting the tax advantages of being in the low tax, crappy service hell hole of Florida. The state gave them a sweetheart deal, basically the libertarian dream of only paying for their own privatized infrastructure while keeping low taxes.
As much as love seeing DeSantis get burned I say a POX on both their houses, Disney should be forced to live with the same crappy service as the rest of Florida if they don’t want to pay taxes.
There's a reason Meatball Ron is so suitable.
Technically, I probably don't approve of Disney's legal shenanigans.
Why?
Disney is a powerful company that has probably done quite a few questionable things over the years. But even large, powerful, very rich firms deserve the benefits of the rule of law.
If an autocratic shitbag like DeSantis feels free to use Banana Republic tactics against people he doesn't like, those people are to be applauded—not questioned—for standing up for themselves by outsmarting the autocrat.