Disney has filed a new Motion to Compel Discovery in its lawsuit against Governor DeSantis and the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District (CFTOD), which he established, according to WDW News Today. The move requests that CFTOD provide the discovery records to the original state lawsuit’s judge within seven days.
This most recent move follows Disney’s previous lawsuit against the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District for their noncompliance with providing the required paperwork.
Disney maintains, as reported by WDW News Today, that the CFTOD violates Florida’s public records legislation. Their current action against CFTOD is based on the company’s unjustifiable delay, failure to produce, retain, and recover records.
Disney claims that the recovery of a document they requested seven months ago, in May 2023, has been delayed as a result of these violations of Florida’s public records legislation.
Disney had earlier asked for and been granted a 75-day extension of time, claiming that the District “has been rushing consideration of its motion for summary judgment while dodging its obligations to produce concededly relevant discovery.” Disney claims that on August 29, 2023, they gave the District access to the findings.
Since the Court’s Order on November 17, 2023, granting the continuance, the District has persistently delayed providing WDPR discovery. Despite agreeing to produce requested documents and acknowledging their relevance, the District has missed multiple production deadlines.
Most recently, it failed to meet the committed date for substantially completing its production, having produced only 888 documents since the Court extended the summary judgment hearing date.
Additionally, the District has declined to respond to three out of WDPR’s five interrogatories, which are crucial to WDPR’s defenses and counterclaims. WDPR cannot afford to wait any longer for the District to fulfill its promises of producing essential discovery required to defend against the District’s claims and advance its counterclaims.
Furthermore, even with the new summary judgment hearing date set for March 12, 2024, WDPR’s deadline to file its opposition is just two months away.
Without the Court’s intervention, there is little optimism that the District will produce the outstanding discovery, let alone provide sufficient time for WDPR to review it before depositions or the deadline for submitting its summary judgment opposition.
Among the questions left unanswered are whether or not the District Administrator and members of the CFTOD Board “were selected based on their willingness to continue the State’s campaign of retaliation against [Disney] for expressing a viewpoint that Governor DeSantis and his legislative allies disagree with” and how the candidates for these positions were chosen.
The Walt Disney Company’s resistance to a hotly contested Florida statute pertaining to classroom education and discussion on sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools caused the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, and the company to first battle.
