FLORIDA WISHED UPON A STAR AND DREAMS CAME TRUE

Palm Beach Post (Florida) September 29, 1991 Sunday

Copyright 1991 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc. All Rights Reserved

CANDY HATCHER,

To appreciate what Walt Disney has meant to Florida, you must believe in fairy tales.

Orlando, for those who believe, is a small-city-turned-metropolis that

bursts with opportunities because Disney sprinkled pixie dust on a cow pasture and created a Magic Kingdom in Orlando’s back yard.

The city has become a concentration of entertainment and hospitality and agriculture and commerce and technology that has brought together the performer, the hotel clerk, the citrus grower, the banker and engineer. Orlando has come to represent clean streets and clean fun, green lawns and greenbacks, mice and magic. Central Florida, once a mixture of citrus groves and cow pastures with a few military folks and astronauts thrown in, hosts 14 million visitors and takes $5 billion a year from them for providing food, lodging, entertainment and transportation.

The face of this land of swamps and sandhills changed when Walt Disney World opened 20 years ago Tuesday. The creative corporate giant settled in, and all the growth and greed associated with profitmaking came with it.

In the name of progress, Central Florida encased its heart in fiberglass and became an international mecca of family entertainment.

The Disney legacy, however, has become more than entertainment. It is a state of mind.

Visitors rarely are informative about what they’ve experienced at the 43- square-mile compound that is Disney

World. They see it all as a dream and pack it away in a corner of their mind as something larger than life.

In this place, anything can happen. Disney can create wind in Central Florida when the nearest breeze is 50 miles away. It can show you a fake fire and make you back away from the heat. It can take you back to the 1950s with Lucy Ricardo or forward to the 21st century with a rocket ride in space. Mickey Mouse, a walking, smiling, cuddly, 6-foot-tall manifestation of goodwill, can magically make you forget any complaints you had about the expense of the trip or the length of the lines or the dripping humidity, just by giving your 3-year-old a hug.

Four-year-old Katie Schneider, recounting her favorite moment in the Magic Kingdom, bursts out that Minnie has kissed her! And although this isn’t Katie’s first visit (“I been here when I was in my Mommy’s tummy”), it is the one she will remember. Disney counts on such memories to keep visitors coming back. And two- thirds of the 80 million people who have been there have come back, saying they’ve never seen any place so clean or so friendly. They’re right. The property — three theme parks, two water parks, a campground, 18 hotels, three golf courses and a complex of nightclubs and

shopping centers — is immaculate. Not a stray ice cream wrapper in sight. When the Magic Kingdom closes each night, some of the more than 3,000 custodial and maintenance “hosts” touch up the paint on the railings, trim

the duck, mice and swan-shaped shrubs, scrape gum from the sidewalks, empty the trash and sweep the streets. They and the other 30,000 Disney World employees are charged with making everything perfect. The journey into the world of make-believe is supposed to be stress-free and unlike anything you experienced yesterday or will face next week.

If you have a question or a problem, or you need directions, or you can’t find the place that sells peanut-butter-and- jelly milkshakes, but you know

it’s here somewhere, you need only ask.

Anyone wearing a name tag will cheerfully help you.

The guests’ reviews are nearly unanimous. Fantastic, they say, struggling to be specific. As one put it, “Everything’s got something about it.”

The expense — $33 per adult — doesn’t bother them, not only because it’s all-day entertainment for less than the cost of a Broadway ticket, but also because you can’t put a price tag on fantasy.

Carol Wilkinson of Birmingham, England, gushes the words Disney loves to hear. She can’t possibly see everything there is to see during this weeklong trip. “We’ve got to come back again,” she says. “It’s worth every penny.” BEHIND HAPPY FACES There is a side to Mickey Mouse that visitors don’t see.

Mickey is not only a goodwill ambassador, he is the corporate identity for Central Florida’s largest employer. To many of Disney’s neighbors, he represents greed. He has polluted the

lakes, clogged the streets, jacked up property values and put other attractions out of business in the name of profit.

The lakes in Osceola County are so choked with aquatic growth that the natives say fly fishing is impossible. The Kissimmee River is polluted in part because of the county’s development. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency fined Disney $550,000 for sewage violations and for improperly storing toxic waste. While mourning the loss of pristine lakes and land, those in Osceola

County acknowledge that Disney, which straddles Osceola and Orange counties, has been as responsible as the next company about protecting the environment. If the development and resulting pollution must continue, they’d rather it be Disney than an industrial plant.

But they blame Disney for some of Central Florida’s bumper-to-bumper traffic.

In 1969, the No. 1 need on Orange County’s five-year road-improvements list was a 13-mile stretch from north Orlando to Ocoee called Silver Star Road. Because of Disney’s influence, roads near company property were widened and improved while Silver Star continually was bumped from the list. The road wasn’t finished until last year — 21 years later.

Interstate 4 has become “the world’s largest parking lot” at rush hour,

and planners estimate that the six-lane highway will need 22 lanes by the year 2000. Although Disney says it is not responsible for the worst of the traffic, tourists and 33,000 company employees make up many of the drivers. In 1989, Disney agreed to pay $13.4 million for road improvements in Orange County. The most widespread criticism of the company comes from motel clerks and bartenders, real estate agents and lawyers. People throughout Central Florida accuse Disney of breaking the backs of its competitors for business.

Disney moved in and brought millions of tourists to an area unused to seeing strangers. When other attractions followed — Sea World, Wet `n Wild, Church Street Station — and tourists began venturing outside the Disney property for entertainment, Disney countered with similar parks to keep people on its property. The Living Seas exhibit featuring dolphins and manatees is similar to Sea World; Disney built its second water park, Typhoon Lagoon, after Wet `n Wild moved in; Pleasure Island, a group of nightclubs on the Disney complex, reminds visitors of Church Street Station in Orlando.

The competition for tourists will exacerbate in 1997 when a Japanese company plans to begin running a high-speed train the 13.5 miles between Orlando’s airport and International Drive. Those who fly to Orlando intending to rent a car and tour Disney and the other attractions will be able ride the train practically to Disney’s doorstep, spend days at Disney’s theme parks and nights in one of Disney’s 18 hotels.

“People (will) arrive there with their pockets full and leave when they have just enough left to get home,” predicts Sherwood Stokes, a retired Haines City lawyer. “Disney does not intend for anyone else to make a dollar.” The company scoffs at that. “Disney’s set a high standard, and as a result, everyone’s won,” says Dianna Morgan, vice president for governmental affairs. Orange County gets $39 million a year in property taxes from Disney; Osceola gets $500,000. Hundreds of motels and restaurants have started up to serve Disney’s visitors. One in four people in Central Florida has a job in a tourist-related business.

Dick Batchelor, a former state legislator and lobbyist, fought against the proposal to have the high-speed rail stop on Disney’s property. That plan was scrapped in favor of the International Drive site, but it “made marvelous business sense” for Disney to want the train stop.

“They’re a private, for-profit company. Having a $700 million, 300-mph train taking passengers to (their) front door and holding them on (their) property for five days, that’s just a good business move,” he says.

The job of Disney executives, on behalf of investors and stockholders, is to attract everybody they can to the gates of their theme parks. And if that requires very aggressive marketing programs to divert people from your gate to their gate, that’s their charge: Get every bit of the business they can.

“That’s fair. As long as you do it with private dollars,” Batchelor says.

But the role of state and local governments in this competition is crucial. In designing roads and planning for growth, government must consider the needs of the whole community, not just corporate giants such as Disney.

Paul Pickett, who chaired the Orange County Commission from 1968 to 1972, the years Disney was breaking ground and getting started, says government was putty in Disney’s hands then. Company officials demanded their way with roads and zoning. Pickett told them to go to the devil. Instead, they went to the state.

The Legislature, which saw Disney as synonymous with prosperity, hurriedly created a special governmental district for Disney that has powers similar to a county’s.

Pickett compares it with selling the city of Detroit to General Motors.

Disney security officers have the power of arrest, but the company has no jail or courtroom for the criminals. It builds whenever and wherever it wants, lures millions of people to Central Florida but offers no help for those who can’t find a job or a home. “It’s the behind-the-scenes stuff like that that costs the taxpayers and got me upset,” he says. “That’s a fine entertainment complex. If they would just have put the damn thing down in Tampa or West Palm Beach.” MICKEY A SURPRISE

Disney World almost came to Palm Beach County.

In the early 1960s, John D. MacArthur offered 5,000 acres in the northern part of the county, but Walt Disney wanted much more. MacArthur wouldn’t sell. So Disney found 28,000 acres of mostly cow pasture and swamps in Orange and Osceola counties and set about building a bigger version of Disneyland. While Disney officials quietly bought land in the mid-1960s, rumors

circulated through Orlando and Kissimmee and Haines City that something big was coming. Maybe a defense plant. Perhaps Ford Motor Co. No one suspected Mickey Mouse.

The price of a piece of land increased tenfold. “It was assumed that every piece of road frontage was suitable for a service station or a motel,” Stokes, the Haines City lawyer, remembers.

When Walt Disney announced his plans, job-seekers came to Central Florida from all over the country. Thieves and prostitutes set up camp. What used to be a hometown sort of place became the hottest moneymaking area in the nation. “Everybody was excited about Disney World’s coming,” Haines City

merchant Henry Richards recalls. “All the kids were looking for Mickey Mouse, and all the adults were looking for a job.”

Haines City, a poor citrus town, has not changed much in the 20 years since Disney’s gates opened. Teachers still are among the highest-paid people in town. Property values increased in anticipation of Disney, but little development followed. “We were just a little far south,” businessmen said. They say they are prepared for the day Disney develops its southernmost property, and people look to their town for motels, restaurants and gas stations. They don’t want what happened to Kissimmee to happen to them. Kissimmee is 10 minutes from Disney World, and the road to the Magic Kingdom leads smack through its sideshows. It is the Gateway to the Worlds, and it takes you through Bargain World and Gift World, Record World and Amusement World, Shell World and Mel Fisher’s World of Treasure.

The 14-mile strip between Florida’s Turnpike and Interstate 4 leads past

Fun & Wheels Family Fun Park and Billy Boy’s T-shirts and Gilligan’s Restaurant, by four International Houses of Pancakes and four Travelodges and four McDonald’s, past Psychic

Readings by Laura, the Xanadu Home of the Future and a Baptist Church that calls itself “an Oasis in the Desert.”

Kissimmee’s older generation calls it tacky town. There, you can buy a T- shirt for $1.79, a night in a motel for $21.09, an egg-and-pancake breakfast for $1.37.

The old-timers “are totally offended by the whole mess,” says Dan

Autrey, a former Kissimmee city councilman who explains that growth and property values ran away from the town before government could control them. Orlando, however, has parlayed the tourist draw into a whopping convention business and was cited by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top 10 boom towns of the 1990s Orlando is nothing like Palm Beach; it is nothing like Miami. It is not Port St. Lucie multiplied by six nor Boca Raton multiplied by three.

It has the youngest population of any big city in Florida with a median age of 30; its people are mostly white and middle class. The average price for a new home is about $14,000 less than the national average. Westinghouse, the American Automobile Association headquarters, AT&T and the movie industry have come to town since Disney arrived. Campus Crusade for Christ is on its way. Even Tammy

Faye Bakker is there.

“It wasn’t exactly a backwater town, but Disney and the other attractions have transformed Orlando,” says John Rutherford of the Orlando/Orange County Convention & Visitors Bureau Inc. “The perception out there is that Orlando IS Disney. . . . It’s not terrible. There are worse companies that could dominate your city’s image.”MORE’S ON THE WAY

This is the Disney Decade. Company executives say all the growth of the 1980s — the opening of Epcot Center, Disney-MGM Studios, Typhoon Lagoon and Pleasure Island — is a preview of what is planned for the next 10 years.

There  will  be  a  fourth  theme  park.  Disney’s  Morgan  said  the  company  hasn’t decided  the  theme,  although speculation is that it will be a marine motif.

The company plans to double the size of Disney-MGM Studios, build two more golf courses, add attractions to Epcot Center and build more moderately priced hotels. That means hiring another 34,000 people and preparing for 70 percent more tourists.

And Disney wants to build a town for 20,000 people.

The company calls it Celebrations. For $2.5 billion, it plans to build 8,000 “moderately upscale” homes in the same development with offices, schools, a shopping mall and performing arts center. The town would be built on 5,150 acres straddling Interstate 4 in Osceola County. Disney Chairman Michael Eisner, who gained notoriety by accepting $40 million in salary, bonuses and stock in 1988 and made $11 million last year, plans to give more details on the Disney Decade Monday during the three-day

20th anniversary celebration. The party is touted as “a blowout so big it must be a dream,” and Eisner is expected to rededicate “the most magical place on Earth.”

Trouble is, not everyone believes in fairy tales.