Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (right) (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)
Disney has quietly entered into a contract with a Florida government board that seriously thwarts Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ plans to select an oversight board to manage the property Disney has controlled for decades.
When we last left DeSantis’ battle with Disney, the governor signed a bill that took control of the 25,000-acre Reedy Creek Improvement District away from Disney and put it in his hands. of five supervisors hand-picked by the Governor himself. The move was DeSantis’ response to Disney’s vocal opposition to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, widely known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
DeSantis touted the legislation as a much-needed end to the “irresponsible corporate kingdom” ruled by the Disney empire. However, DeSantis’ new Central Florida Tourism Oversight Board (the body that replaced the Reedy Creek Improvement District) is powerless because of Disney’s forward-thinking lawyers.
At the first meeting of the Board of Supervisors, member Ron Peri announced that a few weeks before DeSantis signed into law HB-9, Disney and Reedy Creek had entered into formal contracts that ceded control of the district’s development rights and privileges to the society. As a result, Peri explained, DeSantis’ newly created board of directors has almost none of the authority it boasted of having.
Peri lamented Disney’s legal maneuver, which stripped the Supervisory Board of all oversight powers:
I can’t tell you the level of my disappointment at Disney. I thought so much better of them. This essentially makes Disney the government. This council loses, for practical purposes, most of its ability to do anything beyond road maintenance and basic infrastructure maintenance.
The agreement states that the district is prohibited from using the name “Disney” or any other associated symbol without the company’s permission or risk being sued for damages. The agreement specifies that it will remain in place “until perpetuity”.
At the same time, agreements that stretch indefinitely sometimes violate an arcane legal rule called the Rule Against Perpetuities (“RAP”) — but Disney’s attorneys include an additional clause that created a back-up plan just in case. the RAP would become problematic.
The contract included this sentence: “If the agreement is deemed to violate the rules against perpetuity, it will be in force until 21 years after the death of the last surviving descendant of the King of England Charles III.”
As a result, the deal could survive long into the future.
Peri called the deal “extremely aggressive overbreadth” and said the documents were invalid from their inception.
Disney released a statement saying:
“All agreements signed between Disney and the District were appropriate and were discussed and approved in open and public forums observed, in accordance with the Government of Florida in Sunshine Law.”
DeSantis, meanwhile, reacted to Disney’s maneuver by saying, “The 11th-hour effort to undermine the will of Florida voters and that contracts that were pushed at the last minute are most likely void in law. .”
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