Disney’s Abandoned $1B Florida Relocation Plan Breeds Employee Class-Action Suit In Fallout From DeSantis Dust-Up

deadline.com:

Disney‘s now-abandoned Florida relocation plan for staffers has created some pretty dark legal skies. More than a year after the once again Bob Iger-run Disney dropped its Bob Chapek-era initiative to consolidate some California operations and employees in a new campus in Orlando’s Lake Nona area, a current VP of Product Design and a director of Product Design are taking the company to court in a potential class action. “As a result of relying on the statements relating to the Lake Nona project, and Disney’s failure to share the concealed facts, Plaintiffs, and all similarly situated employees, experienced various harms including losses relating to selling their homes in California, purchasing new homes in Florida, and other expenses and damages related to unnecessarily moving across the country,” reads the jury-seeking complaint (read it here) filed Wednesday night in Los Angeles Superior Court by Disney staffers Maria De La Cruz and George Fong.

Casting aside its 2021 proclamations of “Florida’s business-friendly climate, the state’s generous $500 million tax credit offer and Chapek’s idea of an amalgamation of resources, Disney pulled the plug on the ambitious $1 billion and more Lake Nona project in May 2023.

The death knell was a consequence of the company’s now concluded legal battle with onetime presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis over his Don’t Say Gay law, so-called woke corporate polices and bureaucratic control of the area around Disney World.

With the relocation already push back once before to 2026, the real-world fallout of the battle of the political and C-suite titans shattered the lives of the people in the middle, the lawsuit claims. “Plaintiffs, and similarly situated employees, would not have