The Way Epcot Was Sold: A working community of 20,000
“Everything in Epcot will be dedicated to the happiness of the people who will live, work, and play here.”
The idea was to build high-density apartments surrounding a business center; beyond that would be a greenbelt and recreation area; the outermost rings would be low-density residential streets. There’d be “playgrounds, churches and schools . . . distinctive neigborhoods . . . and footpaths for children going to school” in Disney’s proposed utopia. A multimodal transportation system incorporating surface trains, a monorail, and a “webway people mover” would render automobiles unnecessary, a la Seaside.
Then came the rub: Disney demanded municipal bonding authority, three highway interchanges, and the creation of two municipalities together with an autonomous political district controlled by the company. In effect, Disney wanted his own corporate-controlled state within the state.
Though Disney wouldn’t live to see it, he was granted his Reedy Creek Improvement District, which is still “governed” by a supervisory board “elected” by the landowners -- i.e., the Walt Disney Company.
As described by a former head executive, Reedy Creek, “gave us all the powers of the two counties in which we sit to the exclusion of their exercising any powers, and of course it let us issue bonds. We could do anything the city or county could do.”
Reedy Creek handles its own planning and zoning. It lays out roads and sewer lines, licenses the sale of alcoholic beverages. Building codes? Psh, Reedy Creek employs the building inspectors. It employs its own fire department. Contracts its own eight-hundred-member security force.
But that whole utopian city thing? The enticement that ultimately sealed the deal for the people of Florida? It was all a ruse. The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was just another theme park. And though more than 55,000 people work in the Reedy Creek Improvement District by day; and though more than 100,000 patronize its stand-alone restaurants, clubs, and theaters every night -- Reedy Creek retains a permanent population of about fifty. Most of whom are company executives or their family members.
Walt Disney demanded and received the powers of a democratically elected government and his corporation ducked the botheration of, you know constituents. Constituents who might challenge Disney’s top-down plans or even vote them out of power. The constitutionality of the arrangement has never been challenged.
“By turning the state of Florida and its statutes into their enabler, “ T.D. Allman writes, “Disney and his successors pioneered a business model based on public subsidy of private profit coupled with corporate immunity from the laws, regulations, and taxes imposed on people that now increasingly characterizes the economy of the United States.”
From “In the Land of Good Living” by Kent Russell,
