Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida easily sees more than fifty million guests every year.
It also stands as the largest single-site employer in the United States, with over 70,000 cast members.
It’s easy to liken it to a city because the reality is that it is a city.
In fact it’s two cities and a special district, and while that’s all boring legislation
on paper, it’s one of the most crucial elements in this vacation kingdom working the way it does.
So today I’m going to take a close look at the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the
city of Bay Lake, and the city of Lake Buena Vista to see how they work, why they were
created, and how they shaped Walt Disney World into what it is today.
Alright let's start at the top.
This is Florida.
Home to mosquitoes, humidity, and a very strange super hero.
Like most states, it's comprised of many smaller jurisdictions called counties.
Walt Disney World is here.
It sits in Orange and Osceola County, but mostly Orange.
Disney World also sits within a Disney World shaped special district called the Reedy Creek
Improvement District.
As you probably already suspect and we will soon learn, this is not a coincidence.
Like Disney, Reedy Creek sits within Orange and Osceola County, but mostly Orange.
Now within that district sits two cities: the city of Bay Lake and the city of Lake Buena.
They both reside entirely in Orange county.
So to recap, Disney World spans two cities and one special district which sits within
two counties… in one state.
Now… why?
Why a special district?
Why two cities?
The answer: EPCOT.
EPCOT was Walt’s baby when it came to the Disney World project.
It was going to be his answer to the many growing problems in American cities at the time.
A fully planned community that would house up to 20,000 residents who would act as living
testers for what could be done with technology, organization, and most importantly, control.
A large part of what made Disneyland such a success was the carefully controlled design
and layout of the park, and the idea was that same level of control and design would create
an equally successful city.
On top of that, Walt wanted EPCOT to be a city of the future, so much so that the first
letter of EPCOT is literally “experimental”.
That meant experimental layouts, experimental building techniques, experimental transportation
methods, even experimental forms of education for the kids living there.
All of that experimenting sounded really great on paper, but it would also mean constantly
convincing Orange County to go along with their plans since the county controlled all of that.
Unless… they didn’t have to ask the county to play along.
Enter, the special district.
Special districts in Florida date all the way back to the Road, Highway, and Ferry Act
of 1822, which was so far back that Florida wasn’t even a state yet.
The general idea behind a special district is that it’s a governing jurisdiction that
gets established to focus on one specific purpose.
So for instance, a special district might be setup with a focus on mosquito control
in the area.
They’d be given the powers to create, manage, and maintain the systems needed to keep mosquito
numbers down, and they’d be able to do it using taxes they had the power to levy or
bonds they’d have the ability to issue.
The idea was that having a specific board focused on that one single task would mean
it would be executed better than if it was one of the many different tasks that a general-purpose
government like a county, had to worry about.
So here comes Disney, figuring that if they establish a special district for themselves,
it’d give them the ability to govern themselves so that Orange and Osceola Counties wouldn’t have to.
It would give them control.
So what would that special district be established for?
Mosquito management?
Roads?
Water management?
Waste management?
Utilities?
Building codes?
The answer, as it turned out, was “all of the above.”
The Reedy Creek Improvement District, named after the creek running through Disney’s
land, was unlike any other special district that came before it.
Reedy Creek aimed to control as much as possible.
Disney would be able to issue bonds to fund its development, establish and enforce their
own building codes, maintain their own utilities, and build their own road system.
It even provided an open ended freedom to utilize nuclear power and other experimental
forms of power that might be developed later on.
But special districts, by design, don’t offer powers for everything.
So even with Reedy Creek, Disney would still be dependent on the counties for some matters,
unless they formed their own city while they were at it.
During a seminar in June of 1965, which was called the Project Future Seminar, Disney
leadership got together to discuss all of the plans, issues, and potential solutions
that would come with Walt’s Disney World idea.
A city municipality would grant Disney the power to issue business licenses, build health
care facilities, manage communication such as telephone service, establish a police force,
setup a civil court with appointed judges, and even own and operate a cemetery.
Just some of the many things that a city would typically need.
Disney decided to propose two cities.
Bay Lake would sit within the northern end of their property and encompass everything
that was going to be tied to the vacation resort.
The city of Reedy Creek would initially sit towards the south, overlapping with both Orange
and Osceola counties.
It would cover the area that Walt originally envisioned for Disney World’s airport and
entrance complex.
The land in between, reserved for EPCOT and the industrial park, would be governed by
just Reedy Creek, the district not the city.
This approach protected them a bit.
If something went awry with EPCOT, it would minimize the impact on the vacation portion
of their land and vice versa.
It would also free them up to eventually develop areas of the city of Reedy Creek for residents
without having to worry about its impact on the Magic Kingdom.
In fairness, this approach wasn’t a one-way street either.
By establishing the district and municipalities, Disney would effectively be able to tax themselves
in order to pay for and build the massive infrastructure that a project like Disney
World would require, rather than passing on the bill to the taxpayers of Orange County,
which was about a fifth of the population it is today.
This seminar is also where the initial idea came up to limit voting rights within the
district to just landowners.
Disney was concerned that if those 20,000 residents of EPCOT decided to vote against
Disney’s interests, they’d lose that one element they held closest to them: control.
So instead, they would lease the housing to EPCOT’s residents, disqualifying them from
voting rights in the district.
Disney, owning the overwhelming majority of land in the district, would have all of the
voting power, and thus complete control of Reedy Creek.
Now if all of this sounds like a gray area, that’s because it was.
Even at the time, Disney wasn’t fully sure if this idea had legs.
They cited three court cases as precedent to defend their ability to limit voting rights,
but at the very same time another case, Avery v Midland County, was making its way to the
supreme court.
And while that case was not a 1:1 comparison to what Disney wanted to do, it was all about
equal voting rights within a county based on population density.
Ultimately the court sided with Avery which indirectly put a big question mark over EPCOT.
It didn’t necessarily invalidate Disney’s idea, but it was a reminder to them that at
some point in the future a resident of EPCOT might challenge Disney’s way of governing,
and they might even win.
But it was a bridge to cross another day.
In December of 1966 Walt Disney died, and very quickly the entire Disney World project
was up in the air.
Without a visionary like Walt to lead the charge, how could something as unique as EPCOT
come to fruition?
However just as quickly as the project was thrown into question, that question was answered,
and it was answered by Walt’s older brother Roy.
Roy pledged to move forward with the Disney World project.
The plan would be to start with phase one, which would include the Magic Kingdom theme
park and its surrounding hotels.
EPCOT, the city, would have to come later.
Now, this is all important because this quick turn of events really set the stage for the
next 50 years of Disney World’s history.
In 1966, Walt Disney Productions was nowhere near the international mega-corporation that
The Walt Disney Company is today.
Walt wasn’t some numbers-driven CEO looking to please shareholders.
To many he was Uncle Walt, and he was a personality that a generation had grown up watching on
television every week.
An unprecedented amount of governmental authority over private land was about to be requested
by a company that the country trusted while they were still mourning the loss of their
beloved boss.
On top of that, it was a request that came with it a promise of making Florida the eventual
home of a city of the future that would lure in industry, tourists, and folks looking to
make central Florida their home.
So it was no surprise that when legislation to create the Reedy Creek Improvement District,
and the cities of Reedy Creek and Bay Lake was introduced, it was passed with virtually
no resistance.
In the wake of Walt’s death, Walt Disney Productions found themselves with a level
of control that would appease most of the concerns they had when it came to the future
of Disney World.
Less than three years later, while the resort was still in the process of being built, Disney
once again turned to the state of Florida to pass legislation moving some things around.
Citing a “rearrangement of development activity and adjustment of our planning activities”
which is as vague as it sounds, Disney wanted to move the city of Reedy Creek from the border
of Orange and Osceola County to the northeastern portion of their land.
It was that same year they’d rename the city from Reedy Creek to Lake Buena Vista,
which was a reference to the street that Walt Disney Studios was located on over in California.
To run and manage the two cities and district, a small select handful of loyal Disney employees
would get to live on property in order to vote.
Part of the agreement included a buy-back clause that gave Disney the right to purchase
back that land in the event of the employee’s termination with the company.
So if that Disney employee went rogue and started voting against Disney, all Disney
would have to do is fire them, buy back the land, and effectively strip that person of
their voting rights.
When Disney World opened in 1971, Walt had been gone for nearly five years, yet his dream
of EPCOT the city was still around.
Prior to the opening Disney created a subsidiary called the Buena Vista Land Company, which
would be tasked with developing the city of Lake Buena Vista as a sort-of warm-up for EPCOT.
However just two months after the opening of Walt Disney World, Roy Disney passed away.
For the first time Walt Disney Productions wasn’t run by a Disney.
In January of 1972, Disney formally announced their plans for the city of Lake Buena Vista.
Those plans included four new hotels, a shopping center, a golf course, townhouses, apartments,
a 10-bed emergency hospital, and a post office.
It would represent a fifty-million dollar investment by both Disney and partnering companies.
The initial goal was to reach between three and four thousand residents within the first
five years, with a maximum residency of fifteen thousand.
There was even talk of establishing a Lake Buena Vista police force once it was fully developed.
But now without Walt or Roy steering the ship, the first signs of abandoning the city concepts
began to show.
Disney did go through with a lot of those Lake Buena Vista plans.
The Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village was built, as was the golf course, post office,
and 27 townhouse retreats.
But that’s where the hesitancy came through.
Rather than selling the town-homes to people who would become residents of Lake Buena Vista,
Disney instead opted to lease them to corporations, with the hope that those corporations would
use them as employee retreats or for potential clients.
Lake Buena Vista would ultimately never see those fifteen thousand residents.
It didn’t even see the initial three to four thousand.
The shopping village would eventually be known as Downtown Disney and today Disney Springs.
The town-homes built for those first residents would eventually become the Saratoga Springs
Resort and Spa and Treehouse Villas.
The Lake Buena Vista golf course would… well that just remained a golf course.
As the plans for residents at Lake Buena Vista faded away, so too did the plans for a city
called EPCOT.
The evolution of EPCOT from city of tomorrow to Disney World’s second theme park could
fill an entire video in itself, but the short of it is that it was eventually designed to
be a year-round permanent World’s Fair.
It would showcase new technologies from corporate partners and give guests a cultural taste
of various nations from around the world with international pavilions.
There were undoubtedly many long and short term causes for that EPCOT evolution.
The death of its visionary creator.
The passing of Roy.
The economic woes of the 1970’s due to two energy crisis’ overseas.
Perhaps another reason to add to the list was the uncertainty.
The uncertainty that a means of maintaining control, which would have been crucial to a project
like EPCOT, would not last a challenge.
In 1978 and then again in 1983 the city of Bay Lake was expanded, annexing land that
was once set aside for the city of EPCOT.
By that point the public had already known that EPCOT was not going to be the city of
the future Walt dreamed of.
On paper, that expansion of Bay Lake meant that any protections the two municipalities
offered Disney in their attempt to put a theme park and city in the same place were gone.
Outside of the small group of hand-picked employees who controlled the cities in Disney’s
stead, nobody would live at Disney World.
This would be true of the future as well.
Decades later when Disney embarked on creating the town of Celebration, they were careful
to de-annex the land from the Reedy Creek Improvement District, removing any chance
of the homeowners impacting their kingdom.
It was a precautionary measure they would take once more when they created Golden Oak,
another community, this time tucked right between Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista.
These two places are often sold-as and covered-as an opportunity to live at Disney World, and
while it’s about as close as you can get to living at Disney World, Disney made sure
you technically aren’t.
Over those years the state has, on more than one occasion, explored the possibility of
revoking Disney’s control through dissolving Reedy Creek, but it never got anywhere close
to happening.
The reality is that even though Disney never carried through with their initial promise
of a city of the future, they still contributed a great deal to the development of central Florida.
There may not be 20,000 residents in EPCOT, but Orange County now has over 1.3 million
residents, and it would be foolish to pretend that Disney didn’t play a big part in that.
On top of that, Disney has been pretty responsible with the powers they’ve been granted, to
the point where they haven’t even exercised most of the ones tied to having a city.
There is no Disney police force.
No courts with judges appointed by the mouse.
No nuclear power plants.
Like any other place, it’s not perfect, but as far as resorts go it’s incredibly
safe and well maintained.
So really, Florida doesn’t see much of a reason to take those powers away.
Reedy Creek, and it’s two cities, are fascinating.
On the one hand, they absolutely played a crucial role in the development of Walt Disney World.
To this day, Disney’s control over their land has allowed them to build something that
truly is one of a kind.
On the other hand, they were initially formed with the goal of making this dream of EPCOT
a reality, and in that sense they never fulfilled their purpose.
EPCOT was a concept that required an unmatched level of control in Florida, and even with
an unprecedented level of power, Disney wasn’t 100% sure it would work.
It was a big “what-if” in a story filled with “what-ifs”.
We’ll never know how the journey of Reedy Creek would have differed had Walt not died
in 1966, or if they decided to go forward with EPCOT or Lake Buena Vista despite the
uncertainties, or if that means of governing was ever challenged.
We were potentially a few key moments away from a very different Walt Disney World.