It’s a Sure Bet That Bidding for Disney Will Get Intense

You’re in a high-stakes poker game with an opponent you don’t know very well. You’re sitting on a full house, but you can’t tell by the look in the other guy’s face whether he’s got the four of a kind that’ll beat you.

The pot is getting pretty steep, and this is one hand you don’t want to lose. So, do you keep raising the bet and try to force the other guy out, or do you stand pat? And what do you do if he raises the bet? Is he bluffing, or has he really got the cards?

The cities of Long Beach and Anaheim have been at the table for some time now, but the game is starting to heat up.

The stakes are a $3-billion Disney theme park that will create an estimated 37,000 jobs and a probable tourist bonanza for whichever city gets it. Factor in the national prestige that comes with a Disney park, and you get some idea of the pot that’s sitting in the middle of the table.

The early indications are that the Long Beach and Anaheim mayors, Ernie Kell and Fred Hunter, respectively, are pretty cool customers. Neither is squirming in his seat. Neither has gone to the handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from the upper lip.

For openers, both mayors say they don’t think Disney is playing the cities against each other. Maybe they believe that, or maybe they just think it’d be too impolitic to say otherwise.

But none other than Michael Eisner himself, Disney’s chief executive officer, has been quoted in Amusement Business, which focuses on the amusement industry trade, as saying that the bottom line for building the theme park is “which community wants us more.”

Karen Oertley, the publisher of the Nashville, Tenn.-based magazine, said the Disney track record is so attractive that vying for the next major park is like “bidding for the Super Bowl . . . or a Major League expansion franchise.”

Of Disney, one local public official says, “They’re great businessmen. They’d be fools if they didn’t” pit the cities against each other.

But listen to the steely nerved mayors.

“It could be a coup and it could be a disaster,” says Long Beach Mayor Kell. “If (the city) doesn’t mitigate the environmental impact and the traffic impact . . . the city that wins may be the loser.”

But Kell then turns around and asserts that “there’s no doubt that we’re holding cards. If Disney is just looking for property values, they could get a better deal in Victorville or in Baker. They’ve got a lot of good land buys out there. . . . I just honestly believe and believe that most analysts think that if they build on the water (in Long Beach), you have something new and exciting that no one else in the world has. . . .

“But the worst thing any city could do is get stampeded into making a decision that it’ll regret for the next 50 years. This project is going to be around for the next 50 to 100 years, and for a city to be stampeded into making a buy because someone else wants it would be making a big mistake.”

Nice poker playing, mayor. Display the strength of your hand but don’t appear overeager.

Over to Hunter, not exactly known as a shrinking violet. “We’re looking at the Disney Corp. in Anaheim as nothing more than another developer in our city, just on a bigger scale,” the mayor said.

“The bind I am not going to get into is this--of a competition between Anaheim and Long Beach, where one city or the other is going to give away the store to get the project. That’s not going to work here because we already have Disneyland.

“I’m not going to say anything disparaging about Mayor Kell or the Long Beach project,” Hunter said. “I do know that Disney has done a lot of things in the last 90 days, acquired substantial amounts of properties at some sums that are very large, which gives me the indication that the Disneyland Resort and the WESTCOT Center are going to go forward in the city of Anaheim.”

Excellent counter, mayor. Show your own strength. Give Long Beach something to think about.

That’s where we are at this stage of the game as the final betting round nears: both sides expressing quiet confidence in the cards they’re holding.

Yet, methinks the mayors doth seem almost too cool.

Methinks there could be some ante-raising in the months ahead. There are lots of things cities can do to sweeten the pot--just ask the Rams, Angels or the operators of the proposed sports arena in Anaheim how friendly city government can be when it really wants something.

No, don’t be surprised if one side or the other has a couple tricks up its sleeve.

Then we’ll see who goes for the handkerchief first.