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SENTINEL SPECIAL REPORT
Crackdown at Disney - An analysis finds that Orange County deputies are writing many more tickets on the resort's property.
Scott Powers and Beth Kassab | Sentinel Staff Writers
Posted April 8, 2006
There's a new thrill ride at Walt Disney World that visitors will want to avoid: one in which a police car pursues you.
At Disney's request, Orange County deputy sheriffs have been hitting the streets there hard, sometimes writing dozens of traffic tickets a day for violations ranging from speeding to loud stereos, a Sentinel analysis has found.
The crackdown marks a dramatic change at Disney World. For a long time, uniformed traffic officers in marked patrol cars were hard to find on Disney roads. Not anymore.
Disney's attitude of keeping uniformed police barely visible to tourists changed after 9-11 when it began encouraging deputies to have a higher profile on the property. Then last year -- after increased concerns about speeding and traffic violations -- the two towns that make up the Disney resort signed landmark contracts with the Orange County Sheriff's Office to double the number of deputies assigned to the area.
During their first few months on the job, deputies wrote an average of 26 tickets a day at Disney World -- compared with an average of three per day during the first few months of 2004, according to the Sheriff's Office. The pace slowed down by last fall, and the Sheriff's Office said that is partly because traffic has slowed down. But deputies still frequently wrote more than 20 tickets a day during a three-month period examined by the Sentinel.
"It's worked great," said Capt. Ted Brown, head of the Sheriff's Office's Sector VI, a division created by the new contracts to focus on the resort.
The number of tickets does not surprise Disney officials. "Any day of the week, we have 200,000 people on our property . . . and the more than 100 lane miles of public roads supporting Walt Disney World," said spokeswoman Kim Prunty. "This all goes back to the safety of our guests and cast. Traffic safety is important to us."
To get a closer look at the effort, the Sentinel reviewed data on 1,212 tickets that deputies wrote in August, September and October of last year. The Sentinel then randomly selected 10 percent of those tickets (122) and obtained copies of the actual citations. Among the patterns:
Locals are getting nabbed much more than tourists.
Out of 122 tickets examined, 105 drivers were written citations (some got more than one citation). Of those, 81 lived in Central Florida, according to the drivers license noted on the ticket. Just seven lived out of state. The rest lived in other parts of Florida.
Deputies focused mostly on Buena Vista Drive and World Drive.
However, deputies aren't ignoring other roads; they wrote tickets on 26 different Disney streets in those three months.
Deputies are far more likely to write tickets at Disney for insurance, registration or vehicle violations than they would in other parts of Orange County.
For example, deputies wrote 40 tickets at Disney in August, September and October for car stereos that were too loud, nearly 4 percent of the 1,212 tickets in that period. Countywide, noise tickets amounted to less than half of 1 percent during that time.
Disney spokeswoman Prunty said the company wanted a more aggressive approach to traffic, and gave the sheriff no restrictions.
"There has not been a directive, go easy on guests, go easy on cast members, go easy on executives," she said. "Nothing like that."
Brown of the Sheriff's Office concurred.
"There's been some discussion that we were picking on cast members or people that worked here versus other people. That's not true. We're pulling over speeders," he said. "Whether the person gets a ticket or not doesn't have anything to do with whether they're local or whether they're an employee here."
But Brown acknowledged that some deputies might give tourists a break.
"I think your odds are pretty good when you pull somebody over that you're going to pull over a tourist," he said. "Do we really want to get into writing all kinds of tourists tickets versus can the problem be solved by a courtesy notice?"
There's also evidence to suggest that drivers, regardless of where they're from, are catching some breaks.
Disney employee Joseph Isserles, for example, was clocked in October going 62 mph in a 40-mph zone on Osceola Parkway near Sherberth Road. But he was written up for just 49 mph.
And Isserles said he knew about the stepped-up patrols because Disney warned employees.
"When you go over that double hill at the Wide World of Sports, two cars are always sitting in the median, so you can see them. There's a guy on both sides of the road with [radar] guns out," said Isserles, 34, of Kissimmee.
Among the 122 tickets examined by the Sentinel, 36 had some sort of notation indicating that the driver was going faster, or was suspected of a more serious offense than the formal charge on the citation.
In the past, the Florida Highway Patrol performed some enforcement but could not monitor traffic at Disney full time. So, through the cities of Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista in late 2004, Disney made significant changes to its contracts with the Sheriff's Office. Those changes included more than doubling the number of deputies assigned to the area and creating a new division devoted to Disney property.
The new contract came under scrutiny last year from some Orange County commissioners who questioned whether Disney was paying its fair share for patrols. The two Disney towns paid $4.1 million last year for 52 sheriff's employees. That's a discount of $12 million compared with the amount the Disney towns would pay if they were subject to taxes paid by property owners in unincorporated Orange County, according to the county Comptroller's Office.
Disney owns approximately 30,000 acres that, in 1967, were specially incorporated into their own taxing district, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which includes the cities of Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake.
That gives the area its own governmental powers, including those of law enforcement. Sgt. Jorge Delahoz of the FHP said generally, law enforcement did not patrol the resort much, with the understanding that if Disney needed more help, it would ask.
Then three or four years ago, Disney asked -- seeking occasional traffic stings from the patrol. Delahoz was in charge of those operations. He said that his troopers found they could hand out tickets as fast as they could write.
"The compliance [with traffic laws] was ridiculous," Delahoz said. "The majority of them, I'd say 90 percent, were employees. The others were guests, and they were all doing 70, 80, 90 [mph]. It was every other car."
Crackdown at Disney - An analysis finds that Orange County deputies are writing many more tickets on the resort's property.
Scott Powers and Beth Kassab | Sentinel Staff Writers
Posted April 8, 2006
There's a new thrill ride at Walt Disney World that visitors will want to avoid: one in which a police car pursues you.
At Disney's request, Orange County deputy sheriffs have been hitting the streets there hard, sometimes writing dozens of traffic tickets a day for violations ranging from speeding to loud stereos, a Sentinel analysis has found.
The crackdown marks a dramatic change at Disney World. For a long time, uniformed traffic officers in marked patrol cars were hard to find on Disney roads. Not anymore.
Disney's attitude of keeping uniformed police barely visible to tourists changed after 9-11 when it began encouraging deputies to have a higher profile on the property. Then last year -- after increased concerns about speeding and traffic violations -- the two towns that make up the Disney resort signed landmark contracts with the Orange County Sheriff's Office to double the number of deputies assigned to the area.
During their first few months on the job, deputies wrote an average of 26 tickets a day at Disney World -- compared with an average of three per day during the first few months of 2004, according to the Sheriff's Office. The pace slowed down by last fall, and the Sheriff's Office said that is partly because traffic has slowed down. But deputies still frequently wrote more than 20 tickets a day during a three-month period examined by the Sentinel.
"It's worked great," said Capt. Ted Brown, head of the Sheriff's Office's Sector VI, a division created by the new contracts to focus on the resort.
The number of tickets does not surprise Disney officials. "Any day of the week, we have 200,000 people on our property . . . and the more than 100 lane miles of public roads supporting Walt Disney World," said spokeswoman Kim Prunty. "This all goes back to the safety of our guests and cast. Traffic safety is important to us."
To get a closer look at the effort, the Sentinel reviewed data on 1,212 tickets that deputies wrote in August, September and October of last year. The Sentinel then randomly selected 10 percent of those tickets (122) and obtained copies of the actual citations. Among the patterns:
Locals are getting nabbed much more than tourists.
Out of 122 tickets examined, 105 drivers were written citations (some got more than one citation). Of those, 81 lived in Central Florida, according to the drivers license noted on the ticket. Just seven lived out of state. The rest lived in other parts of Florida.
Deputies focused mostly on Buena Vista Drive and World Drive.
However, deputies aren't ignoring other roads; they wrote tickets on 26 different Disney streets in those three months.
Deputies are far more likely to write tickets at Disney for insurance, registration or vehicle violations than they would in other parts of Orange County.
For example, deputies wrote 40 tickets at Disney in August, September and October for car stereos that were too loud, nearly 4 percent of the 1,212 tickets in that period. Countywide, noise tickets amounted to less than half of 1 percent during that time.
Disney spokeswoman Prunty said the company wanted a more aggressive approach to traffic, and gave the sheriff no restrictions.
"There has not been a directive, go easy on guests, go easy on cast members, go easy on executives," she said. "Nothing like that."
Brown of the Sheriff's Office concurred.
"There's been some discussion that we were picking on cast members or people that worked here versus other people. That's not true. We're pulling over speeders," he said. "Whether the person gets a ticket or not doesn't have anything to do with whether they're local or whether they're an employee here."
But Brown acknowledged that some deputies might give tourists a break.
"I think your odds are pretty good when you pull somebody over that you're going to pull over a tourist," he said. "Do we really want to get into writing all kinds of tourists tickets versus can the problem be solved by a courtesy notice?"
There's also evidence to suggest that drivers, regardless of where they're from, are catching some breaks.
Disney employee Joseph Isserles, for example, was clocked in October going 62 mph in a 40-mph zone on Osceola Parkway near Sherberth Road. But he was written up for just 49 mph.
And Isserles said he knew about the stepped-up patrols because Disney warned employees.
"When you go over that double hill at the Wide World of Sports, two cars are always sitting in the median, so you can see them. There's a guy on both sides of the road with [radar] guns out," said Isserles, 34, of Kissimmee.
Among the 122 tickets examined by the Sentinel, 36 had some sort of notation indicating that the driver was going faster, or was suspected of a more serious offense than the formal charge on the citation.
In the past, the Florida Highway Patrol performed some enforcement but could not monitor traffic at Disney full time. So, through the cities of Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista in late 2004, Disney made significant changes to its contracts with the Sheriff's Office. Those changes included more than doubling the number of deputies assigned to the area and creating a new division devoted to Disney property.
The new contract came under scrutiny last year from some Orange County commissioners who questioned whether Disney was paying its fair share for patrols. The two Disney towns paid $4.1 million last year for 52 sheriff's employees. That's a discount of $12 million compared with the amount the Disney towns would pay if they were subject to taxes paid by property owners in unincorporated Orange County, according to the county Comptroller's Office.
Disney owns approximately 30,000 acres that, in 1967, were specially incorporated into their own taxing district, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which includes the cities of Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake.
That gives the area its own governmental powers, including those of law enforcement. Sgt. Jorge Delahoz of the FHP said generally, law enforcement did not patrol the resort much, with the understanding that if Disney needed more help, it would ask.
Then three or four years ago, Disney asked -- seeking occasional traffic stings from the patrol. Delahoz was in charge of those operations. He said that his troopers found they could hand out tickets as fast as they could write.
"The compliance [with traffic laws] was ridiculous," Delahoz said. "The majority of them, I'd say 90 percent, were employees. The others were guests, and they were all doing 70, 80, 90 [mph]. It was every other car."
