“Buckle up!” That was Ron DeSantis’ advice on Thursday morning to a room full of Republicans eating breakfast at a sponsored event in Michigan when asked about his ongoing feud with Disney. Which is about to get a whole lot uglier, according to Politico.
The rift between De Santis and the Mouse House began just over a year ago, when Disney openly expressed its opposition to Florida’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill. DeSantis responded by calling Disney “woke,” which is just about the worst thing a person or entity can be called in Republicanspeak these days. But Disney is a behemoth in Florida where, according to the Tallahassee Democrat, the company has a $75.2 billion annual economic impact on Central Florida, adds approximately 465,000 jobs to the workforce, and puts an estimated $5.8 billion back into the state tax revenue’s coffers each year. So DeSantis might have picked a fight with the wrong mouse.
Desantis is now threatening revenge on Disney, saying the state will now look to develop property adjacent to Disney, add toll roads, new taxes, among other things. All this because they criticized one of his policies, and businesses in FL can’t do that. https://t.co/WV42nh3jeo
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 7, 2023
Still, the pudding-lovin’ politician claims that the company “tried to pull a fast one” on the state while working around the DeSantis-directed near-dismantling of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the organization that some believe has let Disney largely govern itself over the past half-century. During a meeting with shareholders earlier this week, Disney CEO Bob Iger called out DeSantis and the new governance as both “anti-business” and “anti-Florida,” which really set Meatball Ron off. As Gary Fineout writes for Politico:
The rapid escalation between Disney and DeSantis this week comes in the aftermath of a Central Florida governing board that had been controlled by Disney passing a series of agreements that ensured Disney would keep a large degree of power despite a new law passed in February that created a new board controlled by the governor.
The moves stunned the DeSantis administration and the governor’s hand-picked board, which has since hired lawyers to examine whether it should challenge the legality of the agreements.
But DeSantis seems to think that something shady is happening and has charged his chief inspector with doing a “thorough review and investigation” into exactly what happened to allow Disney to “undercut Florida’s legislative process, and defy the will of Floridians.” He has also floated the idea of developing state-owned land directly adjacent to the theme parks, imposing tolls on the roads tourists use to travel to Disney, and doing a deep dive on the company’s hotel taxes. In other words: DeSanctimonious wants to tank Disney’s business in Florida, which seems like it would be bad for the state he was elected to govern, but what do we know?
“They are not superior to the people of Florida,” DeSantis said of Disney during a speech at Michigan’s Hillsdale College on Thursday evening. “So come hell or high water we’re going to make sure that [the] policy of Florida carries the day. And so they can keep trying to do things. But ultimately we’re going to win on every single issue involving Disney I can tell you that.”
Mickey might have a different opinion.
(Via Politico)