Anaheim officials are expected to decide next week if they will allow Disney to buy three public streets, including Magic Way, and expand their iconic theme park as a host of concerned Anaheim residents want to know why the city is in a hurry to approve the project.
“We need to stop and study and thoughtfully examine the good for all. No one’s against enlarging Disneyland, but do it thoughtfully,” Anaheim resident Stephanie Mercadante said in a phone interview.
Mercadante, who lives near the theme park, said if city officials rush too fast, the expansion could have big quality of life impacts on nearby residents – including traffic congestion, noise and air pollution.
“I don’t dislike Disney, but I don’t want them to hurt my quality of life either. The more I hear from the residents and the more I walk and talk with people, they feel the same and they just want to coexist,” said Mercadante.
[Read: What Could Disneyland’s Proposed Expansion Mean For Anaheim Residents?]
Suzi Brown, Disneyland Resort’s vice president of communications, said in a Thursday email that the company has been in the process to get city approval for years.
“We have been working with the City and our neighbors for over three years and have followed the process the City has laid out for this Project. It has been thorough and transparent, and we are ready to move forward and need to start planning for our future,” she wrote.
The proposed expansion comes in the wake of the largest corruption scandal in recent Orange County history in which FBI agents and independent investigators – with decades of experience – said Disneyland resort interests hold outsized influence over city hall.
The entertainment juggernaut has been a political kingmaker in OC’s biggest town, spending millions of dollars in recent years to back resort-friendly candidates through the local political action committee, Support Our Anaheim Resort (SOAR).
Disneyland representatives and city officials tout the planned expansion — which won’t increase the theme park’s footprint — as a critical step for Anaheim – dubbed Disneyland Forward — that will come with community benefits like $30 million for affordable housing, $8 million for parks and generate more tax revenue for public services like police.
Disney’s also supposed to invest $1.9 billion in the resort district over the next 10 years.
Critics say it’s a project that has been plagued by a lack of transparency as some residents raise concerns about how quickly the city is moving on approving the theme park’s expansion and the impacts it will have on their quality of life.
Environmental documents and detailed specifics on the proposal were posted last September.
City officials kicked off the approval process in January.
For some residents, the process is reminiscent of the failed Angel Stadium land sale that was also detailed by FBI agents, who accused former Mayor Harry Sidhu of trying to get $1 million in campaign support from Angels executives for ramming through the deal.
The land sale ultimately fell apart in 2022 shortly after the FBI corruption investigation was revealed and Sidhu pleaded guilty to public corruption charges in 2023, including lying to investigators about trying to ram through the deal.
[Read: Ex-Anaheim Mayor Sidhu Agrees to Plead Guilty to Corruption Charges]
City staff say the upcoming Tuesday vote is the culmination of a process that started in 2021 – when Sidhu was still mayor.
On Wednesday, city officials hosted an open house where residents could drop by and ask questions of city staff and Disney representatives at different tables in the Anaheim Downtown Community Center
The open house comes less than a week before city council members are expected to take a vote on its approval at their 5 p.m. Tuesday meeting.
Councilwoman Norma Campos Kurtz, who was appointed to the city council in 2023 and has ties to SOAR, said she was not ready to answer a reporter’s questions on the project at Wednesday’s open house – less than a week before she’s expected to vote on the proposal.
She also did not respond to emailed questions Wednesday.
The rest of the council members did not return requests for comment Wednesday.
Shades of the Stadium Deal?
Cynthia Ward, a resident, former council aide and longtime activist, said Wednesday there’s a pattern of how the city goes through the process with projects like Angel Stadium and Disneyland Forward.
“We’ve seen this so many times. They start off with an announcement that somebody’s doing a project and we get no details at all. It’s very generic and then they say, but we’ll come back with details later,” she said.
While city spokesman Mike Lyster said the city posted Disney’s initial documents online in 2021, Ward said detailed information about the proposal wasn’t posted until much later.
“Then two years later, they come back with the details and we go, oh, wait a minute this is terrible and they go well, where have you been? We’ve been doing this for two years.”
In December 2019, city council members voted to begin the sale – despite not knowing the final price tag – a little over a month before negotiations formally began. Before that vote, residents only had a little over two weeks to review the sale proposal.
At the time, the stadium process sparked transparency concerns, something also later detailed by independent investigators.
[Read: Did Anaheim Council Members Know About Stadium Sale Proposal Beforehand?]
Jeanine Robbins, resident and longtime activist, also said there are a lot of similarities between the stadium deal and the Disneyland project, including concerns with the appraisal for selling three public streets and city staff seemingly pushing the project before council members vote on it.
She said the reason the city and Disney are rushing on the project is because it’s an election year.
“They obviously want to do it before November, but they also want to do it before (Councilwoman) Natalie Rubalcava is potentially recalled,” she said. “They put almost a half million dollars towards her election so they want to make sure they get their money’s worth.”
Rubalcava, who was elected in 2022 with $380,000 in support from SOAR, is facing a recall election in June after independent investigators accused an Anaheim Chamber of Commerce-created resident advisory group helped her get elected and alleged that she broke city charter rules by going over the city manager and directing staff herself.
The councilwoman has denied those allegations.
[Read: Anaheim City Councilwoman Natalie Rubalcava Faces June Recall Election]
Lyster said what’s similar to the stadium deal is the “extensive information sharing” with residents.
“The issues that arose with the stadium outside of that process – now of course, we look back and condemn those,” he said during an interview at Wednesday’s workshop.
He also said the Disneyland Forward was a three-year process and that Disney did their outreach since then and while the city started theirs last fall, they have shared documents on it since 2021.
According to a city fact sheet, the city released an environmental analysis – which is 17,000 pages – last September, held three workshops on the project, a planning commission vote in March and Wednesday’s open house.
“We understand there are people that will have strong opinions about this and we’re going to hear from them why the rush? We understand that but for us, it’s a culmination of a long process,” Lyster said.
“There are other projects in our city that might get approved much more quickly than that. They might be smaller, granted, but six months is quite a long time.”
Brown, Disneyland’s vice president of communication, echoed Lyster’s remarks and disagreed with the comparisons to the Angel Stadium deal in a Thursday email.
“The City’s process for DisneylandForward has been thorough and transparent over the last three years and has provided members of the public many opportunities to participate and provide feedback. In fact, some of that feedback has been incorporated into the Project,” she wrote.
Still, residents like Mercadante, hope the council will take more time to publicly consider the project and said residents didn’t know about the project three years ago.
“It is Angel Stadium Part Two. They are behaving just the same and it’s surprising they haven’t learned, but I did not hear about it three years ago or I would have been doing this three years ago,” she said in a Wednesday phone interview.
“The players in the Angel Stadium are still operating, they said they were going to change and they’re looking to learn from their mistakes and they haven’t changed. It’s still going on.”
Mercadante recently started canvassing and walking her neighborhood after she heard about the expansion, informing residents and circulating a petition against the sale of a street called Magic Way.
She said the hardcopy petition has close to 400 signatures – all from people living near the planned expansion – and the online petition as of Thursday morning has 493 signatures.
Carolina Mendez, an Anaheim resident and organizer with Mijente, also noted the similarities between the canned stadium deal and the rush to approve Disneyland Forward in a Voice of OC community opinion piece.
“At the very least, we expect to see a robust debate on the dais on the 16th and I think that that’s something that’s been deprived of, something that our people haven’t gotten, and you see that pattern emerging time and time again,” she said in a phone interview Wednesday.
The Angel Stadium land sale process was plagued by a lack of robust public debates from council members.
[Read: Angel Stadium Sale’s Community Benefits Remain a Mystery, Final Price Tag Unknown]
Mendez said Tuesday’s decision will shape the city’s future for decades and it merits a debate that considers the impacts it will have on residents.
“When you look at what happened with Angel Stadium, you see again, this opportunity for another vote that’s going to be cast without extensive discussion or inquiry from our council,” she said, adding that some council members ran on a platform of transparency.
Marisol Ramirez, deputy director of Orange County Communities Organized for Responsible Development, said residents and community groups were not given an opportunity to share what community benefits they’d like to see negotiated.
“We’ve reached out to the city manager to meet with us to discuss,” she said in a Wednesday interview. “This is our bread and butter and yet he has refused to have a conversation with us about what our interests are for community benefits agreements.”
Lyster said residents always have an opportunity to share their input with the city, but did not say if there was a specific workshop to discuss community benefits.
“Based on running feedback we’ve already heard, we know that affordable housing and parks are priorities for our residents and shared that as part of discussions about a development agreement,” he wrote in an email Thursday.
Like Robbins, Ramirez also said there has been an effort by city staff to market and push the project through, similar to the Angel Stadium deal.
Ward said she had hope for change in Anaheim, but the Disneyland Forward process killed that.
“They know everybody’s watching. They know people are upset. They know people are looking for a clean slate,” she said. “But they’re still running the same plays.”
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.
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