State Officials To Visit Disneyland To Work On Reopening Plans
It looks like progress is being made in California when it comes to opening the Disneyland theme parks!? A delegation of state officials will be paying a visit to Disneyland this week to review reopening plans. This is after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration traveled to Florida last week to inspect COVID-19 protocols at Disney World which has had theme parks reopen since July.
If you’ve been following along with MickeyBlog over the past few weeks then you know that the Disney officials have been asking state officials for months to review the parks’ COVID-19 health and safety protocols and to come up with a reopening plan. According to a piece in the Orange County Register the delegation visiting the parks includes representatives from the California Department of Public Health, California Division of Occupational Safety and Health and the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development.
California Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly said during a news conference this week saying, “In terms of the California visits, those are upcoming, and together the information and the dialogue with our theme park operators across the state will help us land in a place that I think we can all feel confident is based on the best and most up-to-date information.”
The in-state theme park visits in Southern California follow out-of-state visits to theme parks in Central Florida.
We’re told that the trip to Florida gave the California state health officials an opportunity to check out Walt Disney World’s current COVID-19 health and safety guidelines for California theme parks before coming up with a reopening plan of their own.
“We sent health officials to open and operating theme parks out of state last week, independently of operators, to assess the health safeguards in practice,” Folmar said via email. “These visits will help inform our pending theme park guidance.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom explained the thinking behind the visit which was for officials to see what was working and what wasn’t before coming up with an action plan. In a press conference he spoke of the visit saying, “I have a whole team that spends their time not only getting the answer to that question, but asking those same questions.” The governor continued, “As a proof point of that, we have supported an effort to actually find out directly by sending our own team to these sites, as relates to theme parks, to get a better sense of what’s going on. While we absolutely take people’s word for information that they provide us, we want to see things for ourselves.”
Newsom said of the next steps, “I want folks to come back (From Florida) and tell me what they saw, what their own experience was,” Newsom said during the news conference.
California Attractions and Parks Association executive director Erin Guerrero applauded Newsom’s decision to have a team visit California’s theme parks to review COVID-19 health and safety protocols saying, “It was heartening to hear Gov. Newsom share that his administration is ready to work with the theme park industry.” Guerrero continues, “We applaud the governor for accepting our invitation to visit California’s iconic parks and we are eager to work together so theme parks can reopen responsibly and soon. Doing so will allow tens of thousands of people to get back to work and provide a much-needed jump start for local and state economies that have been decimated by the shutdown.”
Disney announced in late September that 28,000 employees would be laid off in the Disney Parks, Entertainment and Products division citing lack of a reopening plan at Disneyland Resort as one of the reasons. It is estimated that 8,700 cast members at Disneyland will be losing their jobs adding further pressure to the State to devise an strategy to get the local economy in Anaheim (including the theme parks) reopened.
This is a story that we’ll continue to follow closely here at MickeyBlog. Readers are encouraged to keep following along with us for further news and updates.
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Source: Orange County Register