In 1967, the Florida Legislature created the Reedy Creek Improvement District — nearly 25,000 acres across Orange and Osceola counties, granted the same authority and responsibility as an actual county government. Disney World was built inside it, and for the next 56 years Disney effectively ran its own local government: its own zoning and planning decisions, its own building codes, its own fire department, its own roads, water, and waste collection — largely exempt from the regulations, taxes, and fees that applied everywhere else in Florida.^[1] That arrangement ended in 2023, when the state took control, renamed it the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, and installed its own board — the direct result of a political fight between Disney and the governor over Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law.^[2]

The scale that arrangement was built to serve is real, and it didn't end with Reedy Creek. Walt Disney World is the largest single-site employer in the United States — more than 77,000 direct employees across its parks, resorts, and Disney Springs — with an annual payroll exceeding $3.5 billion. Counting contractors, vendors, and the broader supply chain the resort supports, Disney's total employment footprint on the Orlando metro tops 200,000 jobs.^[3]

Orlando's theme-park economy isn't frozen in the past, either. Universal opened Epic Universe in May 2025 after a roughly $7 billion build — the company's biggest single investment in the resort's history. The park is projected to generate about $2 billion for Florida in its first year alone, part of an estimated $11 billion in nationwide economic impact from construction and operations combined. Building it employed about 65,000 construction workers, and Universal projects more than 17,500 new permanent jobs nationwide tied to its opening.^[4]

Two competitors, both still expanding at a scale most industries never reach, sitting inside a metro most people only picture as a vacation destination. One of them spent more than half a century as its own government before the state took that back. That's not incidental to the tourism story — it's the infrastructure the tourism story was actually running on the whole time.