The tourism body appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to oversee Disney World and its properties announced Tuesday that it will discontinue all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, including related roles.
Race-based contracting and a DEI committee will be eliminated, the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District confirmed in a statement, because these initiatives “discriminated against Americans based on gender and race, costing taxpayers millions of dollars.”
The announcement follows an internal investigation into the district’s policies.
“The so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives were advanced during the tenure of the previous board and they were illegal and simply un-American,” District Administrator Glenton Gilzean said. “Our district will no longer participate in any attempt to divide us by race or advance the notion that we are not created equal. As the former head of the Central Florida Urban League, a civil rights organization, I can say definitively that our community thrives only when we work together despite our differences.”
The GOP 2024 candidate has signed multiple pieces of legislation combating DEI initiatives in public and higher education. He spearheaded the state’s “Stop WOKE” law, which prohibits businesses, colleges and K-12 schools from incorporating critical-race theory into curricula, before a federal judge blocked it last year. Another law DeSantis signed in May defunded DEI programs at colleges in Florida’s state university system.
After Disney decided to wade into politics last year by condemning Florida’s popular Parental Rights in Education bill, which banned sexual instruction in K-3, DeSantis retaliated by signing a bill stripping Disney of its 56-year-old “independent special district” status. That designation had granted the amusement park and resort complex the privilege of creating its own regulations, building codes, and other municipal services.
Lawmakers then decided against dissolving the district, instead giving DeSantis the power to appoint the district’s board members. The governor installed a new board of supervisors to manage Disney’s premises, renaming the Reedy Creek Improvement District the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District.
In an attempt to thwart the DeSantis takeover, the Disney-controlled board handed control of the district’s development over to Disney. The DeSantis-backed board then voted to void the Disney-controlled board’s agreements with the company after DeSantis contended they weren’t legal. The Walt Disney Company sued DeSantis and other state leaders, accusing them of running an intimidation campaign and imposing “punishment for Disney’s protected speech.”
In its Tuesday statement, the board noted that Reedy Creek routinely awarded contracts based on racially and gender driven goals to businesses on the basis of their owners’ race and gender. Reedy Creek often instituted gender and racial quotas “to ensure that contractors met a certain threshold of diversity.”
“In order to meet these quotas, it is estimated that the district had to pay millions of dollars more in order to find businesses who could comply,” the statement said.