So we weren’t taking crazy pills after all. That half-billion dollar bond that we Anaheim taxpayers took out in 1996 and are still paying off, which paid for the construction of Disneyland’s “Mickey & Friends” Parking Structure which was at the time the largest parking structure west of the Mississippi, with 10,000 spaces, which technically belongs to the city now while Disney leases it from us for a dollar a year while they make $70-80 million off it, and which we’ve agreed to sign over to them as soon as we’re done paying off the bond in a decade or so, IS IN FACT A SUBSIDY.
So ruled a three-judge panel of the 4th Appellate District Court on Thursday. I learned about this development in a Voice of OC story entitled “Disneyland Workers Could Get Nearly $20 an Hour Following Appeals Court Ruling.” I almost didn’t read the story because of its title – big deal, most Disneyland workers already get nearly $20 an hour. But… oh, it’s THAT appeal! You might say, the Voice “buried their lede” here.
This goes back to 2018’s Measure L, when Anaheim’s people by an 8% margin voted that employees of companies who enjoyed a subsidy from the city must pay their employees a “Living Wage” – $17 an hour at the time, and increasing yearly. Famously subsidized hoteliers GardenWalk’s Bill O’Connell and Wincome’s Paul Sanford “sucked it up” and followed the new ordinance. (And they’re doing fine.)
But DISNEY, the biggest subsidized employer most of us had in mind, unilaterally gave up their most recent subsidies at the time – a luxury hotel and a 45-year promise of No Gate Tax – and announced they were now exempt from Measure L. A lot of us said, “Hey, what about that huge Mickey & Friends Garage we built for them in ’96, that they’re still profiting off of? If that’s not a subsidy what is?” But they said no it’s not, and found a Judge William Claster to agree with them in 2021, and they remained blissfully unaffected by Measure L, and we all felt crazy as usual. (I wrote about it all here at the time, and included a hilarious video of Councilman Jose Moreno and disgraced Mayor Harry Sidhu nearly coming to blows over the issue.)
But Disney workers appealed … and now THIS good news! We were right! (I won’t get into the boring technical arguments here, different definitions of “tax rebate.”) Apart from the vindication of having the courts agree with us that this working-class town subsidizes a multi-billion dollar multinational corporation, what happens next? Two questions –
- Will Disney appeal? Things don’t usually get better climbing up the appellate ladder from here. But also –
- Aren’t they gonna owe a shitload of back wages at this point? A WINDFALL for a lot of employees who may not even still work there? I would think so!
Another question – how was it really worth it to Disney to give up their luxury hotel subsidy and the written-in-stone promise of no Gate Tax for 45 years, just to avoid the $17 an hour of Measure L? I’m no mathematician nor a business genius, but that was always a puzzler to me. A clue might be hidden in Disney Resort President Ken Potrock’s recent essay against Measure A, in which he states (among several other points that actually sound reasonable) “for Disneyland Resort the portion of the initiative [that raises wages] is not a matter of finances, it’s a matter of principle.” It sounds like Disney is THAT strongly, and ideologically, opposed to the government telling them what to pay. Or Anaheim government, anyway. Or, I should say, the people of Anaheim.
Once the COMPANY starts taking orders from THE COMPANY TOWN … I guess that would be the Beginning of the End, in their view. A “slippery slope” in their view. Can’t let that happen. What do YOU think?
But wait – there’s MORE!
Most people don’t know about THIS, but I ask you, how is THIS not another subsidy we gave to Disney in the 90’s?
As part of the ’96 agreement and Environmental Impact Report, which included the sweetheart deal in which we agreed to take out a bond to build Mickey & Friends (and Disney dropped their threat to build California Adventure in Long Beach, as if anyone believed that would happen), Disney agreed to build 500 affordable housing units nearby, theoretically for their workers. It is still there written in the EIR, and the name of then-Mayor Tom Daly – then and for the rest of his long political career funded by Disney – is on there big as John Hancock.
Well, Disney never did build those 500 affordable housing units, and nobody made them do it.
Instead, ANAHEIM – using $12 million of its own federal/state HUD dollars – did it FOR them! To be precise, we used our housing dollars – which we coulda used anywhere else – to renovate and modernize what were then the Jeffrey Lynn Apartments (now Hermosa Village.) The housing there was made more affordable but REDUCED, it became very over-crowded, and a lot of the folks from there moved up to the “Chevy Chase” barrio in North Anaheim.
Thus did the Daly-led, Disney-run Anaheim of the late 90’s relieve poor over-burdened Disney of their promised obligation to build new affordable housing, at the cost of OTHER affordable housing we coulda built elsewhere. How do you like THEM apples?
These are the kind of promises, the kind of WELCHING behavior, that the public and city “leaders” should keep in mind, when negotiating over Disneyland Forward, the corporation’s latest 30-year plan for Anaheim.
Teflon Nocella
Long-serving Disneyland “government relations executive” Carrie Nocella is an especially interesting case: of all the members of the “Cabal” running Anaheim who were identified by the FBI last year in their Sidhu/Ament investigations, she is the only one still out there doing her old job, unruffled. Sidhu and Flint disappeared, Ament is supposedly awaiting sentencing, but Carrie – well she seemed to keep a lower profile for a year or so, but now she’s out everywhere doing PR for Disneyland Forward.- She spoke with my wife Donna about it at one park event; when Jeanine Robbins said something critical in the press, Carrie immediately contacted her to try to straighten things out.
The FBI’s references to Carrie are colorful. If you’ll recall, when Mayor Sidhu gave a long speech in March of ’21 urging Council to take out a $210MM bond to help crawl out of our post-COVID debt, that speech was written by Flint, Ament and Nocella. (The memorable part was how when Harry read the speech very badly, stumbling on every other word, Carrie texted Flint “Harry reads your script so poorly,” and Flint replied “LOL he doesn’t practice.”)
But it was a little puzzling why a long speech which didn’t have anything apparent to do with Disney was co-written by Disney’s government flack. Thanks to the FBI, we know that one little change Carrie made in the speech was to remove any reference to a “Disney parking lot.” And sure enough there were no mentions of any Disney parking lot in Harry’s speech. I wonder, were they really referring to the Mickey & Friends Garage? Or some new lot they wanted help with? Who knows.
But I bet Disney’s main concern in overseeing this post-COVID bond speech was to to forestall anyone using our post-COVID economic slump as an excuse to bring back talk of a long-dreamed-of Gate Tax on Disney – which we really need. Not to worry, Carrie, we took out the $210 million bond on our own, putting up our City Hall and nine other city properties as collateral. (And yeah, Harry DID read your speech very poorly.)
The Trickle-Down Council Majority
Now Carrie, and a phalanx of other women who look a lot like her and talk exactly like her, have been out at Anaheim parks doing the (required) public relations for her company’s new 30-year plan, Disneyland Forward. So far it doesn’t appear they are asking for any subsidies per se, or trying to expand outside of their existing property lines, they just want to re-jigger what they do INSIDE those lines, to make room for a bunch more FUN EXCITING RIDES AND EXPERIENCES! If we have a concern at this point, it’s just that the park is expecting FIVE TO TEN MILLION MORE VISITORS PER YEAR, and so what does that mean for transportation, overcrowding, noise, etc? And what will they be demanding down the road, in those regards?
I told one of the Carrie doppelgangers, “Well I’m sure you guys will get whatever you want, since you spend millions every cycle to keep a perpetual Council majority.” And the Carrie doppelganger cheerily retorted, “Yes, we do support candidates we feel are PRO-BUSINESS.”
Huh. I’m not sure “pro-business” exactly describes it. The candidates Disney (and all the city’s big special interests, in lockstep) fund, number one NEVER SAY NO to them. I’m not saying they’re paid off necessarily, maybe some of them believe they’re doing the right thing. But Disney and its allies know that they are backing politicians who BELIEVE or PRETEND TO BELIEVE in TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS, that famous and discredited economic theory that went down with President Reagan – that if you just do anything possible to maximize the profits of the biggest businesses, it will inevitably “trickle down” to the people in the form of wages and taxes.
We have at least 5 out of 7 of these trickle-down politicians on the current council, as we usually do. Call me crazy, call me old-fashioned, but I think a government should be prioritizing the needs of the people who voted for them, over the profits of the corporations who funded them. Disney is looking to make BILLIONS with their Disneyland Forward plan. Fine. I think the least they can do is:
- allow a 2% Gate Tax to go through;
- stop buying our Council, and that means including through PACs like SOAR
- and maybe, just maybe, if they decided not to take ownership of the Parking Garage that Mayor Tom Daly signed away to them, we could be getting that $70 million a year after all we paid on that bond. I’m sure nobody here would complain about that.
Or are we just crazy? Vern out.
In response to your second question, attorneys don’t usually denominate back wages in “shitloads.”
We would say that the back wages Disney will owe will cost a “grotesque number of firefighters.”
Vern notes, and I just put into bold italics, that the recent $210MM bond is based on collateral including “City Hall and nine other city properties.”
This has also come up in discussions of the prospect of the City eventually declaring bankruptcy, which I still believe is the long-term goal or the leech and vulture interests both within Anaheim and, potentially, globally.
At times like this I like to remind people that the government of Anaheim’s biggest fungible asset (fungible means that I’m not counting the smarts and gumption of its employees, or any other thing it can’t liquidate) is not normally included in lists if property. It is the city’s Anaheim Public Utilities, which provides the city’s water and electricity, leaves the city’s residents free from the depredations experienced by many other communities.
I haven’t rechecked this recently, but pre-pandemic Anaheim water rates were, and I suspect still are, really low compared to other municipalities. But they don’t have to be — and I expect that some of the same morally twisted gentlepersons behind the sapping of other city assets believe that by some cosmic law it is wrong for this public asset not to be sucked dry.
For those unfamiliar with this utility, here’s the splash page for it, and following that are the City Council’s appointees to it
which include as(its Chair John Seymour, IS NOT (as erroneously reported here) the former Anaheim Mayor (and, briefly, appointed U.S. Senator after Pete Wilson became Governor after which he was defeated in a special election by… Dianne Feinstein!)https://www.anaheim.net/6099/Public-Utilities
https://www.anaheim.net/1585/Public-Utilities-Board
But lets get to the point: if I’m reading this audit of the finances (and it may be just the water portion of it!) the value of the utility is right around $400 million!
https://anaheim.net/DocumentCenter/View/41226/2021-Audited-Water-Financials
(scroll down to page 5)
Some interest could likely snatch it from a wounded city in bankruptcy for much less than that — especially if the courts considered a transaction between the City Council and the monied interests that helped install them and might try to buy it as being an “arm’s length” transaction.
Why the public employee unions, public safety and otherwise, whose members have their pensions at risk in the event of bankruptcy are not screaming themselves blue in the face about the money being sucked from the city is completely beyond me.
The court of appeal opinion is overkill. Like a duh. The city wasn’t giving its biggest tenant breaks. Hello?!?
Well, up until the success of this appeal, officially NO. Judge Claster ruled NO in 2021. And Disneyland didn’t have to follow Measure L.
What you and I know is one thing. What the courts rule is another. Duh. Bask in the goodness of a sensible ruling.
I know. I’m just pointing out how the obvious can be obscured by politics. I mean they have their own municipality in Florida.
Not anymore they don’t
Great article Vern thank you very much. Where I remember the hotel deals going down was Disney originally was supposed to build their hotel where there was a parking lot was and they changed the plans to move the Hotel where there was some dining and shopping and That sort of thing without informing the city, violating the terms of the subsidy. It looked to me Disney had already lost their subsidy.
I was of the view that Mayor Tait should not allowed Disney to return in the subsidies to hold their feet to the fire so to speak because they promised to turn over a new leaf to turn over a new leaf as far as elections went and not dump six or seven million into our council elections. And you know how that went. And thank you very much for posting the grand battle between Harry Sidhu and Our beloved Dr Moreno over discussing the Mickey and Friends parking structure. A great time was had by all.
Tait only had a functional Council majority for two of his eight years as Mayor, and even during that time he had staff blocking some of what he wanted to do.
Depending on when this happened, he was in no position to “hold their feet to the fire.” But it’s true that he felt that he could use his contacts with Disney’s Board of Directors to reason with them. If the company hadn’t bought a return to Cabal leadership back in, I think, 2016 then maybe it would have worked.
In any event, it was not a lack of grit on his part.
Vindicated finally! Of course “L” applied to Disney. One small (or perhaps not so small) issue. Disney Forward proposes changes not just inside the park boundaries but within the much larger “Resort District”.
One point I forgot to make in this story – but it did make a good basis for my speech at Council last night! – was how the City spokespeople reacted to Judge Claster’s 2021 ruling as though it were a great victory for THEM, and the City! As though the finding that Disney is NOT subsidized, and NOT bound by Measure L to pay a Living Wage, was somehow a big win for Anaheim!
Here’s their celebratory post from 2021, I assume it was written by Mike Lyster unless I hear otherwise. https://www.facebook.com/cityofanaheim/posts/210817481163625
Look at the disgusted reaction it got from most residents! (I wish that would translate at the ballot box.)
Any City statement on the appeals court ruling? Crickets so far….
I just noticed that Gabriel at the Times (and a colleague) wrote a piece about this the day after The Voice’s piece. It was nearly identical and had the same title.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-07-13/disneyland-workers-could-get-a-pay-hike-to-nearly-20-an-hour-after-living-wage-win
One thing Gabriel got that the Voice didn’t (because they are not the Voice which is stonewalled by the kleptocracy) was statements from Disney AND from Disney spokesman I MEAN ANAHEIM SPOKESMAN Mike Lyster. They sound stunned, blindsided:
“Disneyland spokesperson Suzi Brown said the company is ‘reviewing the opinion and considering our options.’
“Anaheim city spokesperson Mike Lyster said: ‘We respectfully question the interpretation but need to analyze the decision in the days ahead to determine what it means.'”
Why do people even ask the Anaheim spokesman for his statement on an issue between Disney and its workers? Well I’m guessing now that Anaheim is in charge of enforcing Measure L. Foxes, henhouses, anyone?
Vern great article . I think that Disney ought to forfeit the parking structure as punishment for their dishonesty .
Has Fabela resigned yet or is he waiting on the JL report?
Waiting for a golden parachute, perhaps?
Yeah, our City Attorney – I mentioned him briefly last night too. You’re referring to the fact that he too opined that Mickey and Friends wasn’t a subsidy… and later, that it wasn’t a “gift of public funds” because SOME public benefit came out of it.
This was after he had watched City Manager Chris Zapata get canned for giving an opinion Sidhu didn’t agree with. Which was probably a lesson for everybody.
So is it true that Anahiems city attorney AND four other “Large” OC cities, Attorneys live in Jessie Lopez (Santa Ana) and within two thousand feet from the guy that Greg Diamond (an attorney himself) called “the Dark Lord”, Miguel Pulido?
This tidbit without distracting from this post leans towards the unpleasant discussion about who the former VOICE OF OC writer Nick Gerda and the mayor of that city rub elbows with.
Despite your diligent attempt at reporting and fighting corruption I CAN ASSURE YOU, NONE OF THESE PEOPLE DINE AT VARSITY BURGERS.
Oh by the way 2 HIGH LEVEL Angel’s execs live there too…..
Hmmmmm
You sound (and spell) like one of our usual trolls, but I don’t see anything vicious here, just nonsensical. I have to correct you on three things:
No attorneys live in Jessie Lopez.
It is me who uses that nickname for Pulido, and it is “The Small Dark Lord.”
Lots of people dine at Varsity, including millionaires, city insiders, and cops.
Carry on.
I think what that guy was saying is that IN FACT several city attorney’s live in Floral Park, which is Jessica Lopez’s ward. They were all at the Fourth Of July party at Pulido’s house along with Todd Spitzer.
Yeah, well, figures. Cabal everywhere. Doesn’t stop us.
Is there a tip here on The Small Dark Lord’s future plans?
If you know that “they were all” at Pulido’s party, then you know who they are. Who are they?
There is some scuttlebutt at city hall that the city may actually do something right at the behest of a powerful citizen in town who urged them to help Jack the owner of Roscoe’s who’s brother owned Tony’s Deli on Anaheim Blvd. He died last year and Jack was stuck with a bad clause in the lease. The city is stepping in.
THIS IS NOT TO BE NEGATIVE because of the POSITIVE outcome. But the person behind this does not think highly of you and your spouse and hopefully that doesn’t mess things up. That would be sad. This is an Anaheim institution. Have poise. The days of yelling profanities is over.
Jaja, whatever. I’ll leave this up for now. Just in case anyone can make any sense out of it.
“Hopefully that doesn’t mess things up.”
It’s OK, I’ll mess it up for you instead.
It is not the place of the city to step in and alter legal but “bad” private lease terms.
Tony’s Deli is a civic treasure; Arte Moreno should give Roscoe’s Jack money.
(You can pick whichever sentence you want and run with it, scuttlebutter.)
Sounds like Taormina. I wonder what help means.
*Disney? Yeah, De Santis is unloading bricks worried about Disney dumping Florida
with its expansion. Meanwhile, our hero Arte Moreno did the right thing and is keeping
our dear Ohtani…….yeehaw!