According to the Orlando Sentinel, Governor Ron DeSantis’ tourism oversight district spent up to $360,000 on a scathing review of Disney’s Reedy Creek Improvement District.
What’s Happening:
- Governor Ron DeSantis’ tourism oversight district spent up to $360,000 on a scathing review of Disney’s Reedy Creek Improvement District.
- They were relying on a group of outside experts to look into decades of Central Florida history and stacks of financial records.
- Officials say that the “consultants flagged opportunities for savings, and the report will more than pay for itself.”
- Board chairman Martin Garcia called the findings “illuminating and not infrequently shocking."
- The report’s authors described the previous Disney-controlled Reedy Creek as “the most egregious exhibition of corporate cronyism in modern American history.”
- The Central Florida Tourism Oversight District budgeted $360,000 for legislative reporting. This included $110,000, which went to a conservative law professor at Virginia’s George Mason University, Donald J. Kochan.
- It is required by law that the reports be provided to the governor and the Florida Legislature.
- In Kochan’s study, he reached conclusions that were the same as Rollins College professor Richard Foglesong’s 2001 book “Married to the Mouse.”
- Married to the Mouse gives details on how Disney shielded its theme parks and resorts from the government on a “false representation that the entertainment giant would build a city of the future.”
- “So the new board pays someone from out of town $100,000 to write a book report on my book, ‘Married to the Mouse,'” Foglesong said in an email. “All facts came from my book; the rest was superfluous.”
- “Basically, he says that if a government doesn’t have a public to hold it accountable, it will resort to cronyism,” Foglesong said. “That goes for CFTOD, too.”
- “Dr. Foglesong’s political science work was extremely useful in my own research, as were scholarly works of others; and where his own research was integrated parts of my report, it was very helpful to apply independent insights from … the law and economics literature to his analysis,” he said.