Opinion by:
E. Eugene Webb PhD
Speculation continues to swirl around why Disney decided to cancel the Lake Nona campus project.
The project was in trouble in one form or
another almost since the beginning. The plan to relocate some 2000 highly
skilled employees from California to Florida was drawing growing opposition
from the employee base.
For some additional insight check out: All
Ears, By Samantha Kendall Posted in May 2023:
What Went WRONG With Disney’s Employee
Relocation to Florida.
It looks like the decision to relocate all
those California employees to Florida was starting to turn into a modern-day
Trail of Tears.
The Lake Nona
campus, announced in 2021, was set to host employees from Disney's Parks,
Experiences and Products division. The company previously delayed the opening
of the campus to 2026. As part of the plans, Disney asked roughly 2,000 Southern
California-based employees to relocate to the planned 60-acre campus.
For more insight check out The New York Times Brooks Barnes: Disney Pulls Plug on $1 Billion Development in
Florida.
When former and now current CEO Bob Iger
replaced Bob Chapek in November of 2022, Iger was faced with many problems, not
the least of which was the lingering Lake Nona project.
Never one to miss an opportunity to cast
responsibility somewhere other than on the Disney organization, Iger announced
the cancellation of the Lake Nona project with a broad hint that the
cancellation was due to the declining relationship between the Disney
corporation and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Not unexpectedly, the mainstream left-leaning
media quickly picked up on this cancellation and began promoting the loss of
2000 jobs and billions of dollars in long term revenues as the result of the
DeSantis Disney feud.
I think the facts will bear out that the
failure of the Lake Nona project had less to do with the political climate and
much more to do with a series of flawed business decisions on the part of the
Disney corporation.
Key in that decision-making process was the
failure to recognize that while Florida may be a very desirable tax environment
and Disney certainly has a large presence in the Central Florida area; Central Florida
is just not California. The type of work done by the people who work at Disney's
Parks, Experiences and Products Division
require both advanced technologically trained employees and highly creative and
artistic individuals.
It's always a good idea to know who your
employees really are before you start trying to move them in totality clear
across the United states.
For now, Iger has done a reasonably good job of
at least convincing the media that his decision to pull this huge project from
Central Florida was, if not directly, indirectly related to his spat with Governor
Ron DeSantis. How well that will play in the political stratosphere remains to
be seen.
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Disclosures:
Portions of this Post were prepared using an
Artificial Intelligence resource
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