Downtown Orange County

[spenser1058]

The past no longer matters - all that’s important is the future and the millions of visitors who come here every year. 

We’ll look at ways to maximize our reliance on our #1 industry, tourism. What’s unique about Orlando no longer matters. What’s important is bringinging more and more visitors to our theme parks every year.

Think about it, no more concerns with things like public parks - our locals can buy annual passes to the theme parks instead!

We’ll encourage the theme parks and the International Drive Resort Area to privatize all services, just as Harris Rosen has done with health care.

The model may even be used for education. Instead of concentrating on pesky things like social studies or mathematics, the schools will now concentrate on their roles to provide a regular supply of workers to our theme parks.

We’ll no longer worry about supporting the arts other than recruiting groups from around the country to perform live shows in our theme parks. What could be more enticing than a reunion tour of Herman’s Hermits!

To begin, here’s a look by Scott Powers at Florida Politics at our plans:

http://floridapolitics.com/archives/231627-drive-plan-start-fashioning-downtown-orange-county

[sunshine]

Good for them. Since Orlando is not showing they are doing anything new to push the boundary, lets OC take the lead. They have the numbers to make any venues successful down there.

[spenser1058]

2 hours ago, sunshine said:

Good for them. Since Orlando is not showing they are doing anything new to push the boundary, lets OC take the lead. They have the numbers to make any venues successful down there.

That was a last salvo from Teresa Jacobs. Now that Jerry Demings rules the roost, any notion of Downtown Orange County is on hiatus.

It’s just important for those who think Downtown Orlando for some reason needs lots of tourists to thrive (it doesn’t, as it has already proved), that if all that matters are tourists then we should go all in and make them the centerpiece of everything we do, just as Harris Rosen and Daytona have long believed (btw, that concept is leading most of its residents to evacuate for the palmetto scrubs.)

One of the things I like best about Orlando is that, thanks to Walt doing his own thing, the ersatz, tacky world that has been the bain of existence for most tourism-driven economies, is concentrated a dozen miles away from where real life is happening. Personally, I’d prefer it to stay that way.

We have all the benefits of the theme parks when we want them and can mostly ignore them when we don’t. It’s great to have visitors who seek us out, but I always thought the bus loads of folks at CSS were a bit much. Virtually none of them ever had any desire to see anything beyond Bob Snow’s faux history.

Edited January 18, 2019 by spenser1058

[spenser1058]

Matt Palm, the well-regarded Arts reporter at the Sentinel, noted yesterday in the paper’s Orlando Now podcast that as the debate rages over fees to be paid by local arts organizations for use of DPAC, some have opted out of downtown entirely for other venues such as the Chapin auditorium at OCCC.

It’s also interesting to note that, since the city passed management duties to DPAC a few years back, Bob Carr rent has also doubled as well.

Maybe Florida Born is prescient in living on I-Drive - maybe it is our future (although weren’t there plans to ditch the Chapin?)

So far, the folks under the Dome are doing a Sgt. Schultz about the whole thing in public.

Welcome To Life In The Late Buddy Era

Edited August 15, 2019 by spenser1058