There’s a Price for Disney’s Giveaways : Complimentary Tickets Given to Anaheim Officials Invite Perception of Influence

The president of Disneyland, Jack Lindquist, says free tickets given to local elected officials are only a tiny portion of many issued each year. He says officials should have no reasonable expectation that these tickets pressure them to do any favors.

The remarks came as the state Fair Political Practices Commission is looking at whether three Anaheim council members should be disqualified from voting on future Disney-related issues for exceeding state limits on gifts received from a single source.

But Lindquist misses the point of what it means to be a public official in receipt of private largess. The Anaheim officials accepted a total of more than $8,000 in free tickets, and they are the very people expected to rule, for example, on a proposed $3-billion expansion of the Disney empire.

And since state law bans officials who accept more than $250 in gifts in a year from voting on issues involving the donor for up to a year, an adverse ruling could affect the ability of these officials to vote on one of the most important projects to come before the city in years.

The park president may be correct in saying that it’s no longer the way it was in the cozy, good old days. But however many hundreds of thousands of complimentary admissions the park disperses around the country over the course of a year, it is not in the job description of local officials to serve as a community relations arm for a city attraction.

Let the public relations people for Disney do that work. Keep city officials removed from even the appearance of being somehow compromised.

The fact that free tickets may have been given out for a long time does not explain much of anything. It ought to be obvious enough that custom does not insulate public officials from the expectation and the perception of influence.

Times have changed all right. But it’s as important as it’s ever been that public officials be seen as doing the public’s work first.