Special Districts Are Kingdoms of Unacceptable Power
Disney’s Reedy Creek is only one of 38,000 such entities nationwide—twice the number of U.S. cities.
Until recently, the Reedy Creek Improvement District was an obscure bit of trivia for students of urban politics. In 1967 Florida created the district so that Walt Disney World could control its local region without input from voters. Last week it entered the national news when the Florida Legislature, in response to Disney’s criticism of the state, passed a law that dissolves Reedy Creek and thus ends Disney’s personal government.
Yet Reedy Creek is only one example of the proliferation of powerful “special districts,” shadowy local governments that exercise ever-greater control over taxation and spending. Florida alone has 1,800 such districts. According to the U.S. Census, there are more than 38,000 of them across the country—double the number of cities.
Although some types of special districts have value, most are superfluous, obscure and burdensome. They are means to escape citizen limitations on government power and should be brought under the control of regular voters and local governments again.
The growth of special districts began in the Great Depression. In 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt urged the formation of special districts to skirt laws that limited the total amount of local debt or required voter referendums to issue debt. New Deal programs required states to create special districts, such as soil and housing authorities, to get federal funds.
Spurred by the feds, the number of special districts exploded in the following decades. Bureaucrats and legislators set up districts to fund irrigation and drainage, fire protection, libraries, community colleges, hospitals, welfare, water, solid waste, mortgage credit, transit, bridges, parks, electrical power, cemeteries, mosquito control and on and on. They also set up special districts like Reedy Creek, which do almost everything a city can do, but without most of the constraints.
Read the full commentary in the Wall Street Journal.
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