What is the special district at the heart of Disney’s feud with Ron DeSantis?
The Reedy Creek Improvement District, set up in 1967, is an American curiosity—and made Disney World possible
THE WORLD’S biggest amusement park was not built in a day. In 1958 planning began for an “eastern Disneyland” to complement the park in Los Angeles; Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida, opened its doors more than a decade later, in 1971. In the intervening years Disney executives and Florida’s officials developed an arrangement that gave Disney near-total control over the roads, public utilities, zoning and building codes, and more on the land on and around which Disney World was built. It also had the power to raise its own municipal debt, of which it has around $1bn today. “Nobody has ever seen anything like it, before or since,” Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, recently wrote.
From the May 6th 2023 edition
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