IT WAS A CON JOB FROM THE START: The Secrets of Reedy Creek.
This Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow — EPCOT for short — is not the Epcot park we know today, though the amusement park shares the idealized planned city’s (now nostalgic) futurism. The EPCOT that was never built was meant to be a real town — and for that to become realized, the Walt Disney Company needed the authority to develop and run a town. So, Florida granted Disney the right to do everything it needed to make that happen, including controlling zoning and regulations and offering public services. Walt Disney’s death is cited as the reason the city never came to be, but the Disney Company’s hold on zoning, regulations, and public services remained.
That’s Disney’s story, anyway. Richard Foglesong, a former professor at Rollins College and author of Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando, says it’s a fabrication.
Disney’s self-governing district, with all its associated resorts and water parks and sports fields and shopping centers, eventually grew to an enormous size. And though it never developed any cities of the future, the area held on to its self-governing privileges.
While Foglesong was reporting his 2001 book, which traces Disney’s use of its government immunities and relationship with the surrounding area, he dug into Disney’s archives, poring over company documents and memos. Instead of evidence of serious plans for the development of an idealized city, he found a warning from a lawyer that such a development could threaten Disney’s control of the land. If there were real residents, they would be able to elect a local government and establish the external control that Disney feared.
Looking at that two-page memo about the development plans, Foglesong recalled in an interview, he saw that “someone had written NO in inch-high letters.”
“I took that memo to the archivist in the Disney Archives, and I asked whose comments these were,” Foglesong said. “The archivist said, ‘That’s Walt Disney’s comment.’ Every place in the memo where the attorney referred to the property of real residents, Walt Disney had written, between the lines, ‘temporary residents/tourists.’ So, in this planning memo, Walt is telling the attorney, ‘We’re not going to build a place with residents.’ ”
Plus: “Technically, the towns of Buena Vista and Bay Lake, both of which sit within Disney’s self-governing district, do have permanent residents—which allows for some small degree of self-governance within the district. Both towns have a city council and elect a mayor. But the residents aren’t just random people. They’re long-term, management-level employees of the company. Too senior to be eligible for labor unions and too personally invested in the company to do anything counter to business interests, these residents are essentially Disney stand-ins. Disney can count on them to not do anything the company doesn’t want.”