The war between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Big Chunk Of Florida Owner The Walt Disney Corporation has been raging for more than a year at this point. It’s a conflict that is, on paper, about things like taxes, development rights, and control over special administrative districts in the state—but which is, in the real world, largely about who’s more willing to hurl the most shit at who at any given moment.
Now, Disney seems increasingly prepared to hurl another load of legal feces in DeSantis’ direction, as THR reports that the mega-corp is pushing forward with plans to launch a brand new countersuit against the governor—who kicked this particular hornets’ nest with his various anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-women, pro-right-wing-base initiatives over the last several years, causing angry Disney employees to prod their employer to get off its ass and actually use some of that considerable power it’s spent the last century accruing to oppose the governor’s general loathsomeness. DeSantis then (allegedly) retaliated against Disney critiques of his “Don’t Say Gay” law by putting a law in place last year that let him appoint the members of the board overseeing Disney’s Reedy Creek Improvement District—a 40 square mile patch surrounding the Florida park that Disney basically ran autonomously for the last 50-odd years—taking control of the district away from the company.
To be clear, Disney is already suing over all this, having launched a federal suit against DeSantis back in April, claiming he was using government power to retaliate against the company for exercising its free speech rights. Now, though, it’s filed for a second set of legal actions, a countersuit claiming that DeSantis’ actions constitute both breach on contract and violations of Florida’s state constitution. (The counter is in response to a suit from the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, claiming Disney illegally stripped the newly appointed board of its authority in the last days before DeSantis passed the new law.) And while DeSantis has publicly told Disney he’s “moved on” from their feud—having presumably milked as much money and votes as he expects to get from publicly boxing with a giant mouse—Disney doesn’t seem to be backing down.
If it’s not clear, the thing that seems to be mostly at risk here—besides public domain over a very expensive pissing match, and a public forum on the general willingness of state governments to use the levers of power to punish detractors—is control over development in the region immediately around the Walt Disney World Resort. Disney already owns the majority of the land in the region—Walt having snapped it up quietly while he was laying down plans for his second park in the last years of his life, determined to stop his personal utopia from being surrounded by the same array of businesses and other third parties that were already tightly encircling California’s Disneyland. But Reedy Creek (now the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District) has been one of the main instruments that Disney has used to keep tight controls on who gets to build what near the park; for good or ill, losing those controls is likely to have long-lasting impacts on the financial health of the park.
