This happened earlier this month but I’m just now getting around to it:

BlogMickey.com has exclusively learned that the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District is, once again, offering Disney passes to employees. As you may remember, the passes were a cornerstone of complaints from Governor DeSantis and his hand-selected Board of Supervisors after they took over the former Reedy Creek Improvement District.

When RCID became CFTOD, the new board published a report where they detailed everything they believe the district was doing wrong. Here’s how they describe it:

The RCID obtained the annual passes from Disney, which described the passes as available for “eligible” employees and retirees “of The Walt Disney Company, its subsidiaries and affiliated and related companies.” This demonstrates that Disney essentially treated the RCID employees as equivalent to Disney employees. These passes are not available to members of the general public and provide numerous benefits that members of the general public cannot access.

I knew that Disney employees receive Blue or Silver passes, but I didn’t know that Disney makes these passes available for “its subsidiaries and affiliated and related companies.” Obviously there’s no publicly available list of companies that have access to this, but my assumption is that this is the internal system Disney uses provide the same Cast Member perks to the employees of their subsidiaries such as ESPN and Marvel.

The CFTOD report also says that these passes for employees were “bribes” that reveal how RCID was “captured” by Disney instead of regulating them. They said it was inappropriate to spend taxpayer money on these passes. I find this very funny for a couple reasons.

First of all, there’s one dominant taxpayer: Disney.1 Basically, they taxed themselves and then used that money to pay themselves back for the passes. Pretending to be mad that Disney spent their own money on themselves is very stupid.

Second, the district wasn’t really created to regulate Disney, it was created to give Disney the powers of a county-level government. The district serves landowners, and there’s one dominant landowner: Disney.2 According to that same report, RCID employees referred to themselves as “the magic behind the magic.” It’s understandable that Disney would consider them to be de facto Disney employees.

Now that the passes have been restored to CFTOD employees (albeit in a modified form), it completely undercuts their original arguments about bribes and regulatory capture. Especially because nothing has changed about how closely the district works with Disney.

So much of this fiasco has turned out to be a waste of everybody’s time.

  1. Disney accounts for 87% of the tax roll in the district according to the latest report. ↩

  2. Disney doesn’t legally own all of the land but they own the vast majority of it, and almost everything else is owned by the district (which is kind of a distinction without a difference). ↩