Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World

Carl Hiaasen, “Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World” Ballantine Publishing Group, 1998, 83 pp.

This is the 15^th book I have read by this author, only the 2^nd I have posted on my blogsite.  The author’s books provide me with an education on the intricacies of Florida politics and threats to the state’s environment.  

Carl Hiaasen was, and still is, a columnist for the Miami Herald as well a best-selling crime novelist.   Although he admittedly thinks Disney World is a good experience for children, he took his son there twice, he is horrified at what Disneyfication has done to the Orlando area.  Orlando is now grid locked with cars most days and the roads are all plastered with kitschy souvenir shops, ‘roadside schlock’ set up to relieve Disney World pilgrims of any leftover cash.   Hiaasen’s dream is to be banned forever from Disney World, this book may help his endeavor.

The author is mostly appalled at the Florida legislators that allowed Disney to form a kind of parallel government, a ‘Vatican with mouse ears’, called the Reedy Improvement District.

My Notes:

Pg. 18:  Disney isn’t in the business of exploiting Nature so much as striving to improve upon it, constantly fine-tuning God’s work.  Lakes for instance, Florida’s lakes are often tea-colored from cypress bark.  For postcard purposes, tea-colored water in the lake was deemed unsuitable for Disney World.  So Team Rodent sprang into action—yanking out man of the cypresses, draining the lake, scraping out the bottom muck, replacing it with imported sand, then refilling the crater.  For good measure they added beaches. 

Pg. 19:  Disneyland Paris didn’t work out too well.  It opened at a cost of $4.4 billion in the spring of 1992.  The wine-loving French resented Disney’s no-alcohol policy, while employees balked at the company’s famous Aryan-android dress code, which forbids makeup, nail polish, and facial hair.  At one point the park was losing the equivalent of $1 million a day, and was reported to be on the verge of closing.  It was saved by a grudging decision by Disney executive to act more European and loosen up the rule.  Today wine is served at Disneyland Paris restaurants, and revenues at the park are rising. 

Pg. 21:  Disney decided to build a 150-acre amusement park six miles from Manassas National Battlefield with a history theme to attract tourists from Washington, D.C.  They would have a campground, a golf course and a resort, twenty-five hundred new residential homes, and a two million square feet of office and commercial space.  This $650 million development was announced with fanfare.  However, the proposed theme park’s proximity to the Manassas National Battlefield, caused an uproar.  This time it wasn’t Nature but American history that Disney sought to polish up and market as a fun ride.  Opponents pointed to the rape of Orlando that had occurred and this time opponents prevailed.  Of course, it did not help that Disney’s normal operating procedure had nonchalantly demanded more than $200 million in state funds for new roads and highway improvements around the park and office complex.  Meanwhile the residents of Prince William County would be expected to contribute another $75 million for water, sewage, landscaping, and other necessities and the Virginia General Assembly approved it all.

Pg. 26:  Florida’s legislators agreed to give Disney World whatever it wanted, and the main thing Disney wanted was autonomy: a private government for constructing and managing an amusement park.  Thus was born the Reedy Creek Improvement District, ‘The Vatican with mouse ears.’  The district is ‘governed’ by a supervisory board elected by the landowners, meaning the Walt Disney Company.  Its borders contain two shell municipalities, Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake, which have a combined permanent population of fewer than fifty souls, mostly company executives and their families.  Everybody knows that Reedy Creek is Disney, although for legal reasons both claim to be separate.  That’s because Florida requires municipal governments to conduct their business in public, and for competitive reasons Team Rodent would rather not.

Never before or since has such outlandish dominion been given to a private corporation.  Disney runs its own utilities.  I administers its own planning and zoning.  It composes its own building codes and employs its own inspectors.  It maintains its own fire department.  It even has the authority to levy taxes.  They also have authority to build their own international airport and eve a nuclear power plant—neither of which the company has so far needed.  They are further empowered to have cemeteries, schools, and police department, and a criminal justice system—so far, not utilized.

Pg. 38:  In 1997 chairman Michael Eisner exercised company stock options that brought him $565 million.  This was the same month that Business Week chose Disney’s board of directors as the worst in America as the members had been handpicked not so much for their business expertise as for their loyalty to Eisner.  Among the directors are his personal architect, his personal attorney, the principal of his children’s elementary school, and seven current and former Disney executives.