Disney’s Political Largesse Largely Bypasses Supervisors

In the world of Orange County supervisorial fund raising, Disneyland is something of a mystery.

Big corporate donors in county politics, the conventional wisdom says, are generally those companies that have significant operations inside the county, employ a large number of people and are politically active.

All three of those criteria certainly apply to Disneyland: It has one the county’s most sterling business reputations and one of its biggest labor forces, and its parent company has deep political pockets. One New Jersey senator, Bill Bradley, got $78,000 from Disney and its employees from 1987 to 1990, campaign records show. State initiative campaigns and candidates received $169,000 from the company last year.

Closer to home, Disneyland has been a major player in Anaheim City Council races, and the firm chipped in $250,000 to aid the passage of Measure M, a half-cent transportation tax that appeared on last year’s ballot.

And yet, the company’s largess for the most part has not reached the County Board of Supervisors.

Since 1977, Disneyland has donated about $13,000 to candidates for county supervisor; the Walt Disney Co., the Disneyland Hotel and Disneyland’s president have made a few contributions as well, but all told it still comes to less than $1,000 per election, a relatively meager sum for such a large and influential company.

Compare that to the Mission Viejo Co., which employs far fewer people--and which, like Disneyland, is part of a national corporation headquartered outside of Orange County. Not counting contributions by its executives, founders and other employees, the Mission Viejo Co. has given a little more than $30,000 during the same period.

All of which raises the inevitable question: Why doesn’t Disneyland give more to candidates for county supervisor?

A company spokesman last week referred that query to Disneyland President Jack Lindquist, but he was out of town and unavailable. Outside the company, observers have no shortage of opinions.

“Here you have a major player in Orange County, and they’re giving in Sacramento and in Washington. You’d think they’d give the maximum to the supervisors,” said Robert M. Stern, the author of California’s Political Reform Act and co-director of the nonprofit California Commission on Campaign Financing. “But they don’t. Why not? Because people don’t give where they’re based; they give where their interests are, and Mickey Mouse’s interests are in Sacramento and in Washington.”

Disneyland currently has no Orange County projects on land strictly governed by the supervisors.

By contrast, the Mission Viejo Co.’s interests clearly overlap with the Orange County government. It is a major developer, and it had to seek approval for its red-tiled city from the Board of Supervisors, whose members have received the company’s contributions.

That’s also the case of other local developers, and Stern and others say that helps explain why development and real estate interests contribute such a sizable chunk of the money collected by candidates for supervisor.

Not everyone subscribes to that view. Costa Mesa lawyer Dana Reed, who has helped candidates raise money here and elsewhere in the state, attributes the development industry’s local contributions to the unusual business environment in Orange County. Most companies--law firms, banks, retailers, aerospace companies--that have big operations here still are merely branch offices, he said.

Their headquarters for the most part are in Los Angeles, and Reed says that’s where they are more likely to give.

“I will tell you it is virtually impossible to get a Los Angeles-based company to have the same level of interest in an Orange County supervisor that an Orange County company has,” Reed said. “They see these people (Los Angeles officials) on television, they see them at parties and at dinners. They don’t see the Orange County supervisors.”

As for Disneyland, Reed concedes that it has not played a major role in contributing to county supervisor campaigns. But he attributes that to the fact that the Walt Disney Co. is based in Burbank, not Orange County, so even an operation as huge and internationally renowned as Disneyland may suffer from the branch-manager problem.

And even among those who argue that developers give large sums because they have more county business than a firm like Disneyland, many say that those donations are not meant to curry favor or buy access. Instead, they see it merely as an extension of the friendships and political alliances that have formed innocently over time.

“Local government deals in land use,” said Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder. “So those people get to know the government. I think that’s why they end up being the big contributors.”