“We need to look at this and fix it,” Brian Aungst Jr., a member of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District’s board of supervisors, said today of a vote passed in February by the then-Disney-owned Reedy Creek Improvement District was held. “This is an undermining of the will of the voters, the legislature and the governor. It completely bypasses that government’s authority to govern.”
The decision essentially gives Disney control of the 27,000 acres of Walt Disney World near Orlando, an agency that lived on Disney-controlled Reedy Creek from 1967 until last month’s vote. The supervisors of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, would perform this duty for the state after DeSantis signed legislation Feb. 27 that transferred the power to his appointees.
DeSantis endorsed the move to wrest control of the special district from Disney after the company opposed the Parental Rights Act, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, but the governor and the law’s supporters say is also so Special treatment for leaving a business. The February vote reversed that.
“This essentially makes Disney the government,” Councilman Ron Peri said, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “For practical reasons, this administration is losing most of its ability to do anything other than maintain the roads and basic infrastructure.”
But at a public meeting held today by media outlets, including the Sentinel, those appointees revealed that the Reedy Creek board would end the new arrangement.
DeSantis officials brought legal counsel to their meeting today to review the district’s agreement last month. The lawyer said the new board only recently discovered the agreements, although they appeared to be public. According to him, the lawyer called them “unusual” and “suspicious”. Bob Rabbit at WESH 2 News in Orlando.
DeSantis spokeswoman Taryn Fenske called the vote one of Disney’s “last ditch efforts” to transfer “duties and authority” to itself in a statement shared with the Sentinel. “An initial assessment suggests that there may be significant legal defects in these agreements that would render the contracts void under the law.”
Walt Disney World Resort claimed in a statement to Deadline that “all agreements between Disney and the District were reasonable and were discussed and approved in open, well-known public forums consistent with the Florida government’s Sunshine Act.”
A “Declaration of Restrictive Covenants” related to the Reedy Creek vote last month indicates that the covenant will remain in effect “21 years after the death of the last surviving descendant of King Charles III, King of England.” the document reads.
This statement is known as the Royal Lives Clause, which is not as unusual as it may seem. It specifies that a given right must be exercised within (usually) the life plus 21 years of the last living descendant of a British monarch who happened to be alive at the time the treaty was made.
The agreement allows Disney to build the highest-density projects and the right to sell or assign those development rights to other landowners in the district without the board having a say, DeSantis’ legal counsel said.
Source: Deadline
Mary Crossley is an author at “The Fashion Vibes”. She is a seasoned journalist who is dedicated to delivering the latest news to her readers. With a keen sense of what’s important, Mary covers a wide range of topics, from politics to lifestyle and everything in between.
