What Happens After "Happily Ever After"? Disney Has an Answer for $2 Million
Florida Man vs. Disney Storyliving
Living is a story, and you can live that story forever. What exactly happens after “happily ever after”? Disney Storyliving happens.
But Disney Storyliving does more than just passively “happen”. You write the story. Disney is giving you the power. You can now write the chapters in your own storybook come to life.
You just have to fork over two million dollars first.
Preface:
In general, with all of my articles, I want to tie them back to the Florida zeitgeist. I may analyze national trends, but I want to tie everything back to Florida. After all, I am Florida’s unsolicited ambassador to the United States. Nobody asked for it, yet here I am.
Today, I want to dissect another endeavor by the Walt Disney Company. A few days ago, I discussed the ill-informed, low-information nostalgia associated with the Magic Kingdom ride Splash Mountain in Orlando.
This article will revolve around a new venture called Storyliving by Disney, a series of master-planned communities designed by Disney Imagineering. So far, Disney has announced two communities: Cotino (in Rancho Mirage, California) and Asteria (in Pittsboro, North Carolina). The California community will open sometime next year while the North Carolina location is tentatively opening sometime in 2027.
No, neither of these locations are in my backyard of Florida, but these two locations are very relevant to the interests of a Florida Man. These communities in California, North Carolina, and likely more parts of the U.S. are inspired by an ethos of the state of Florida. Disney has tried utopias before: the original EPCOT conceived by Walt Disney himself and later on in the city of Celebration, Florida.
Florida culture is now colonizing California and North Carolina, and Disney is Florida’s equivalent of the Dutch East India Company. Disney Storyliving could not exist without Disney’s petri dish of Central Florida, with which it has experimented for the past six decades. You may never live in a Disney-planned community, but the sentiment and philosophy behind this venture will inform the lives of Americans into the rest of 2020s and beyond.
It all begins in a swamp in the humble backyard of the Florida Man, and it will enter your backyard sometime soon. It may not be tomorrow. It may not be next year. It may not be in ten years, but it will happen. What I am discussing today is the face of American residential life for years to come, or at least it will be for the financially stable and comfortable.
Disney Maternity Wards:
I was fooled. I’ll admit it. The country’s longest-running news publication the New York Post tricked me. How could a reputable newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 mislead a responsible news consumer like me? We all have our blindspots, and fake Disney headlines are mine. I guess … I’m a fool. The headline from New York Post about a maternity ward in Magic Kingdom is below.
A few days later, the rumor proved to be false as proven by Snopes. (And Snopes would never lie, right?) It turns out that Mouse Trap News is a satirical news site about Disney, similar to The Onion.
If only the news was true! Think about how much we all could dunk on these pathetic Disney Adults! Now they want to birth their children at Magic Kingdom for $5000??? We’ve all seen the weddings … but now this? What’s next? Getting your corpse buried in the cemetery beside the queue for the Haunted Mansion? Okay. Okay. But we must ask ourselves, “why did I believe this in first place?” Well, it rings true that Disney would do something ridiculous like this. They have done so in the past!
I do not think that the writers of Mouse Trap News are some comedy geniuses that are bound to become the next Larry Davids and Conan O’Briens, but effective satire should often exist in a realm that straddles the line of absurdity and believability. This false headline was believable enough, yet it was also absurd enough that it gave me a brief opportunity to dunk on the Disney cult. What a treat!
Cotino:
Often, what matters is not what is true but what rings true, and the maternity ward story rung true to me. Why? Well, almost two years before the false post from New York Post, a different but actually true story came out of the Disney universe. In February 2022, Disney announced the venture “Disney Storyliving”, a foray into planned gated communities. Although Disney announced plans to build multiple gated communities the future, they first announced the community Cotino in Rancho Mirage, California.
Essentially, Cotino is a Disney cruise that has come to land — specifically — the arid desert. Disney Imagineers are designing much of the community, and Disney is promising the same level of service that Cast Members give you at the Disney parks and cruises. On the surface, if I just showed you the renderings of the community centers and the houses in Cotino, you probably would not realize that Disney had created this. You might see it as just another luxury gated community somewhere in the Southwest. Perhaps a luxury hotel brand — such as the Four Seasons or Ritz Carlton — was constructing a new resort in the California desert.
But this is not Del Webb luxury living. This is Disney Storyliving. This experience transcends any gated community ever devised in the United States. Let’s dissect that term “Disney Storyliving”. The first word is obviously the brand name “Disney”, but we, then, read the second syllable in the phrase “Story”. Now, our eyes have logged “Disney Story-” into our brains.
What is a Disney story? Well, Disney has obviously produced dozens and dozens of “stories” in the past century — from Snow White to The Little Mermaid to the relatively recent acquisition of Star Wars. Regardless of which story first comes to mind, a deluge of many different stories eventually inundates your mind with nostalgic memories of your childhood. Disney stories offer a fantasy land better than your reality. You can be a princess. You can be a superhero. You can be a guy with a lightsaber in space. Anything is possible under the umbrella of Disney IP.
Comparison with the Galactic Starcruiser in Florida:
Next, we read the final word in the phrase “living”. It all comes together now. Disney … Story … Living. By spending $2 million on a planned home in Cotino, I am living a Disney story, but Disney is not specifically branding which story. Disney has experimented in the past with immersive experiences dedicated to one IP. Disney World used to have the Galactic Starcruiser, which has emerged in online discourse because of a viral and brilliant video essay by Jenny Nicholson about her stay in the Starcruiser in Florida. The Galactic Starcruiser serves as the most radical example of Disney immersion so far. It was so extreme and so expensive that Disney only operated it for 19 months — from March 1, 2022, to September 30, 2023.
How does Cotino diverge from previous Disney endeavors in immersive living, such as the Galactic Starcruiser? I bring up the Galactic Starcruiser because it opened less than a month after the announcement of Cotino and Disney Storyliving. They both demonstrate a vision that Disney has for its branded experiences going into the rest of the 2020s decade and beyond.
Firstly, the Galactic Starcruiser was obviously not a permanent living situation as Cotino will be. You would only stay at the Galactic Starcruiser for a fixed stretch of time of two nights. As for Cotino, you ostensibly live there for the rest of your life. After all, that is the implication when Disney includes a dedicated 55+ senior community within Cotino: Longtable Park.
Disney invites you to “write your next chapter at Longtable Park”. Cotino is carefully and deliberately framing your retirement and senior years as your “next chapter” as if you lived in a storybook. What happens after “happily ever after”? Well, Disney’s answer is the community of Longtable Park within Cotino.
That leads me to the second large difference between Cotino and the Galactic Starcruiser. Cotino has not attached itself to any specific Disney IP. They have invited you to write your next chapter! You get to choose the story. Sure, the Galactic Starcruiser still had a choose-your-own-adventure element, but that had to fall within the confines of the Star Wars universe. This time, you get to decide.
A major problem with the Galactic Starcruiser was that it truly could only appeal to the biggest of Star Wars fanatics. Cotino has no limitations. Yes, it likely only appeals to fans of Disney, but you do not have to pledge allegiance to one IP. Furthermore, you can escape the IP at any time. During a stay in the Galactic Starcruiser, you cannot escape the IP at all, but perhaps Cotino does immersion in a more sinister way. At some points of the day, you do not have the illusion of the Disney magic.
When you choose to live in Disney Storyliving, the real elements of life do not vanish. You still fight with your significant other. You have health scares. You hear on the phone that a relative of yours have died. Donald Trump can win the presidency again, but all these equally terrible events still have the ominous, lurking force of Disney in the background. Contrast this with the Galactic Starcruiser. Sure, you have extremely intense immersion for two nights, but — once you complete the two nights — you can fly back to Iowa the next day and return to your mediocre life. The immersion goes from 100% to 0% once you leave the premises of the hotel.
As for Cotino and Disney Storyliving, you might think that you are escaping at any moment, but you are not. You still live within a gate. A gate owned by Disney. A gate designed by Imagineers. You are living in a Disney park, designed just as meticulously by the Imagineers as Animal Kingdom in 1998. The only difference is that you cannot ride a rollercoaster.
The Incredibles’ House:
As I already wrote — on the surface — not much separates Cotino from any other luxury gated community. Look at the picture of one of the housing models that I included earlier in the article. Any development company could have designed that house, but the Disney Storyliving element becomes quite apparent once we look at the club at Cotino, called the Artisan Club.
First of all, that name fits everything that Disney is trying to achieve here. You are an artisan! Just like Walt Disney! Walt Disney loved this part of the California desert, so you are just like him! Second of all, the Artisan Club at Cotino will include a real-life replica of the house of the Parr family, the protagonists of The Incredibles. Specifically, this house appeared in the 2018 sequel Incredibles 2.
This is the sort of structure that Disney would build at Pixar Pier, the 2018 re-theming of Paradise Pier at Disney California Adventure in Anaheim. That would be fine, but rebuilding the house in an actual gated community seems strange. It seems too immersive. You can actually walk around where the Incredibles would have lived if they lived on our corporeal world, but they cannot live on our corporeal world. They are computer-generated animations.
Why is not strange if Disney does it at Disneyland or Disney World? Well, that’s what a theme park is supposed to do. When you go to a Disney park, you are choosing to immerse yourself in a fantasy world, but you eventually leave. It does not matter where you came from. Florida. Another part of the United States. Germany. Brazil. China. Maybe you only live miles from the park in Orlando. In any case, there is separation between you and the fantasy world. As for Cotino, the Parr House could be a short walk from your own home. The fantasy has now seeped into every day life. It is not just a whimsical adventure for a few hours in a park. This is for life. The Parrs are your neighbors just as anyone else is. They are real. You are real. Disney is now blurring the lines between life and the fiction.
Background on Rancho Mirage:
Disney is building Cotino in Rancho Mirage, California — a 3-hour drive from Disneyland in Anaheim and a 3.5-hour drive from the center of Los Angeles. Rancho Mirage sits on the fringe of the sprawl of the second-largest metropolitan area in the U.S. — Greater Los Angeles — which has population of 18.4 million people. Despite its proximity to this megacity, Rancho Mirage sits isolated in the Sonoran Desert. Nobody should live here. Without modern technologies from the 20th century, this area of California would be uninhabitable. Rancho Mirage falls within the larger Coachella Valley in Riverside County. Many other cities call the Coachella Valley home: Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Cathedral City, and Indio (the location of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival).
Historically, Palm Springs has stood as the most prominent and most well-known municipality in the area. In the mid-20th century, Palm Springs served as a respite from the increasingly congested and chaotic Los Angeles. It became a prominent vacation destination. People could visit quiet resorts with glimmering pools and lush, artificial golf courses. Hollywood celebrities began seeking refuge in Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, and the surrounding areas: Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Elvis Presley, and more. As for Rancho Mirage itself, Walt Disney himself loved to go there for vacation. Disney claims that they chose to put Cotino — their first Storyliving community — in Rancho Mirage for that reason.
If you go to Palm Springs or Rancho Mirage today, you might feel as if you are time traveling to the 1950s or 1960s. It has a high concentration of mid-century American architecture.
When you look at the picture of the house shown above, you can clearly see where Disney derived its inspiration for the architecture in The Incredibles, a film series that already plays off nostalgia for superhero culture from the 1950s and 1960s.
If you have not already noticed, I love to dissect etymologies. In branding, etymologies reveal the intent of the creators, in this case, the Walt Disney Company. We already dissected “Disney Storyliving”, so let’s dissect these city names next. The name “Palm Springs” makes pretty clear sense. What about Rancho Mirage — the actual location of Cotino?
In Spanish, “Rancho Mirage” means “Mirage Ranch”. The community colloquially adopted the name for itself in 1934 because a woman named Ruth Wheeler allegedly saw a ranch in the distance that she thought was a mirage. In the days of Manifest Destiny in the 19th century — if you were trekking through a desert in the West — you would not want to see an oasis — a source of water and rejuvenation — which ended up really being a mirage, but obviously, Rancho Mirage is not a mirage. It is there. Millions of gallons of water service the many golf courses in the area. There is actually water coming from … well … somewhere else.
Regardless, the idea of a mirage in the desert perfectly encapsulates the existence of such a place. It should not exist, but it can exist because of our ability to use air conditioning and the ability to pipe in gallons of water from elsewhere in California. Otherwise, the place would wither and die, and nobody could live there. Although the temperature of Rancho Mirage averages at 68 degrees in December, it averages 106 degrees in July. Sure, Rancho Mirage and Palm Springs have become seasonal vacations for the winter, but people still live there in the grueling summer.
Consequently, everything there is artificial. The golf courses are artificial. The pools are imitations of freshwater lakes that one might experience near Lake Tahoe. The cool air that you feel in your home is artificial. It is a very American city. We are fighting against the odds of nature and living where we shouldn’t because of our unnatural manipulation of technology. Americans live on the fringe. I do not live in the Southwest. I do not live in the desert. I live in South Florida, but South Florida exists on fringe as well, albeit in a different way.
Walt Disney’s Obsession with Fringes of the Human Condition:
The weather in Rancho Mirage and the rest of the American deserts is diametrically opposed to what we experience in South Florida. Rancho Mirages sees the scorching sun with very little humidity while South Florida sees the muggiest climate possible in the continental United States mixed with constant rainstorms in the summer. Both places are hotter than the rest of the U.S., albeit for very different environmental reasons. Whenever I visit this part of the country in the Southwest desert, I often feel as if I am stepping onto an alien planet, but I do feel kinship with the desert despite coming from the humid, sub-tropical swamplands of South Florida.
Both Florida and these parts of California exist on the fringe of humanity. We shouldn’t live in these places, but 20th-century technologies allow us to insulate ourselves from the realities of a cruel Earth. What other major similarity do Florida and Southern California have? Walt Disney took great interest in these areas for his development projects. He built his first park (Disneyland) in Anaheim, California, in 1955. He built his second park (Walt Disney World) in Orlando, Florida, in 1971 — but with Disney World, he was building something of a much grander scope than his original park in California. It was in the name. He wasn’t building a land. He was building a world.
Nonetheless, Disney had great interest in these parts of the country despite the fact that he originally came from Kansas City, Missouri. He came from a part of the United States that should exist. Without air conditioning, Kansas City can have tolerable weather as long as you stay inside for the winter. Furthermore, the water source was natural. People founded Kansas City because of its location on the Missouri River, a natural water source not pumped in from the Sierra Nevada, yet Walt Disney developed his two empires in Florida and California.
Walt Disney always knew that he wanted to build a second park after the success of Disneyland in Anaheim. He wanted to build a park that could draw visitors from east of the Mississippi River because Disneyland largely drew people from California and the western United States. Of course, we know today that he ultimately developed the second park in Central Florida, but he did not always have that plan. Originally, Walt was going to build the second park “Walt Disney’s Riverfront Square” in St. Louis alongside the Mississippi River. Just like Kansas City, St. Louis has a reason to exist because of its strategic location on the Mississippi River, which might be the U.S.’s most valuable natural asset. Meanwhile, nobody was living in the swampland of Central Florida at this time in the 1960s.
In the 1960 census, St. Louis was the 10th most populous city in the United States. Los Angeles had not yet overtaken Chicago as the second-most populous city, behind New York City. California had not overtaken New York as the most populous state. The state of New York had a population of 16.7 million people while California had 15.7 million. Florida was only the 10th most populous state at 5.0 million. New York had a population more than triple that of Florida. The City of Orlando only had 88 thousand people.1 St. Louis had 750 thousand people.
Now — in the 2020 Census — Orlando has eclipsed St. Louis. Orlando is the 58th largest city in the United States at 308 thousand people. St. Louis is the 76th largest city with 282 thousand people. California has overtaken New York as the most populous state at a population of 39.5 million people. Florida has overtaken New York too, and Florida is now the third-most populous state at a population of 21.5 million, only behind California and Texas. New York is now only the fourth-most populous state. The United States has obviously shifted from cities on rivers or coasts that should exist to those that shouldn’t.
The country’s demographics and population distribution have drastically changed since 1960, when Walt was planning his second park — but once he encountered conflicts with the city government of St. Louis, he knew that a major city could not support his lofty goals. He needed a frontier. Just as Anaheim could serve as a frontier, Florida now served as a new frontier for the latter third of the 20th century. Despite Florida’s proximity to major population centers on the eastern seaboard, Florida was in many ways just as much a frontier as the American West.
In Florida, Walt could now control the government, which was depending on economic growth from Disney. Six decades later, Florida is booming while St. Louis is declining. I bet that Missouri wished that Disney had built its second resort around St. Louis, but he did not. Cotino, Rancho Mirage, and Palm Springs further serve as a frontier. Rancho Mirage should not be. Florida should not be. Disney should not be.
Isn’t Rancho Mirage (and Florida) already just as fake as Disney World?
To play devil’s advocate for Cotino, I could make the point that Rancho Mirage and Palm Springs are already fake. As I have already listed, the golf courses are fake. The cool air is fake. The pools are fake. What makes this any different from a Disney park?
In 2025, people will move into Cotino. In the 1950s and 1960s, those celebrities like Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley chose to live in Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage. Sinatra was choosing a fake climate that could not exist without those 20th-century technologies. I live in Florida with gated communities speckling our city streets. Those are fake too. If you go into a luxury community in South Florida, you will notice carefully manicured hedges, flowers, and grass. You will notice fake, sinuous roads designed as if you were driving through a mountain (even though you are in flat, sea-level Florida).
This is all true. Humans have manipulated God’s environment to accommodate our own living choices. If you go deep into the Sonoran Desert in California, the cactus is the type of plant that has the most prominence. This is a plant that has developed over millions of years of evolution to have the ability to survive with very little rainfall, yet with a few technological innovations, Frank Sinatra can choose to live comfortably in the harsh desert even though the thermometer outside claims that the temperature is triple digits. In the 21st century, temperature is just a number as is humidity.
How can I say that Frank’s life in Rancho Mirage was any different from Disney creating Pandora land in Animal Kingdom in Orlando? Or Disney’s choice to make its own community in Rancho Mirage in the desert? I would make one major distinction. If people live in the many parts of the United States pretty much uninhabitable just a century ago, are they deciding to escape reality and enter a fantasyland? Just by virtue of living in Phoenix or Miami or San Antonio, are you choosing to escape the world? If we look back at the 2020 census, the three most populous states are states that — in many of their areas — have climates where mass cities could not flourish in the early 20th century (California, Texas, and Florida). Now, they dominate American demographics.
One could castigate those who choose to live in Cotino as adults who cannot let go of the fantasy world of their Disney-dominated childhoods. We could again relate this to a sort of Peter Pan syndrome. Are they trying to escape the realities of adulthood and regain the innocence of childhood? Perhaps they are, but are people who live in California, Texas, or Florida choosing to escape something too? Only 33% of people who live in Florida were actually born in Florida, so the vast majority of now Floridians chose to live in Florida. Out of all of the fifty states, Florida has the 2nd highest proportion of its residents who were born in another state. The only state that beats Florida is Nevada, probably, an even more “fake” state considering the history with Las Vegas (although my thoughts on Las Vegas need to wait).
Therefore, that 67% of Floridians born elsewhere chose to come to the Sunshine State for whatever reason. Perhaps they escaped dictatorships in Latin America or the Caribbean. Perhaps they moved from Ohio to escape the cold. Perhaps they moved from New York to escape the taxes and strict COVID-19 policies. By choosing to migrate to Florida, they also deliberately chose to leave somewhere else. In Florida, approximately 15 million of its residents chose to move from somewhere else. A very similar number of people — 17 million people — chose to visit Magic Kingdom in Orlando in 2022. Are they similar choices? You choose to live in Florida for the rest of your life. Some call it God’s Waiting Room. You choose to go to Disney World for a few hours or a few days of whimsical fun.
Florida promises abstract ideas to people, mostly, freedom to some extent. Freedom from communism. Freedom from taxes. Freedom from the “woke”. Freedom from the law. Freedom from the snow. Freedom from the cold. Disney World and Disneyland offer joy in the nebulous term: magic.
I began this article by referencing the figure of $2 million, the starting price in the communities in Cotino. I glibly remarked that Disney has an answer for “happily ever after” once you fork over that sum of money. My implication is that Disney was squeezing these people for money, which is true to an extent. The whole idea is that Disney parks prey on visitors and up-charges them for everything. That was a huge critique of the Galactic Starcruiser, which charged guests at least $5000 for the two nights. However, doesn’t living in Florida itself have such a price too?
Collier County — where I was born and raised and now work2 — has a median listing price on Zillow of $775 thousand. To live in a coveted gated community, you are most likely entering at least $1 million, and — at the complete end of the spectrum — Collier County boasts the home with the highest listing price in American history at $295 million. You may not be paying income tax in Florida, but the municipal governments can get their fair share via property taxes.
I understand the idea of the fantastical nature of the state of Florida. It might be the most surreal state out of all fifty of them, and — at a smaller scope — I understand the farcical and fantastical nature of vacationing or living in Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage on the other coast in California. I could cynically just categorize all of Florida as just a big Disney World. That’s a flashy take.
To some extent, I hold that take. The spirit of the take resonates with me, but I would argue that Cotino takes it a bit further than just living in a garden-variety gated community in Sarasota. In the typical gated community, you still exist within a civilization. You have to escape the gate at some point during the day to go to Publix or go to work. Your kids go to school outside the gate, but — in Cotino — everything happens within the gate. Rancho Mirage is isolated enough from regular civilization, and Cotino adds another layer.
The Future:
I do not know the future of Disney Storyliving. Right now, Disney has only planned the two communities, in California and North Carolina. The second community Asteria will be built in Pittsboro, North Carolina. This area of North Carolina does not have the same historical weight and cultural gravity that Palm Springs and Rancho Mirago do. There is a reason why Disney chose Rancho Mirage first. I believe that they are making an artistic statement with that decision.
Perhaps Disney will make more and more Disney Storyliving communities until they have one in every metropolitan area in the country. Perhaps we will get a Marvel-themed gated community and a Star Wars one! Alternatively, perhaps Disney Storyliving will be a financial flop, and Disney will stop after the North Carolina location. Perhaps they will even cancel it in North Carolina. Disney has a long history of canceling massive development projects.
Perhaps the maternity wards at Magic Kingdom will eventually become real because it seems as if Disney is trying to raise people cradle-to-grave. You enter the world into Magic Kingdom. You watch the princess movies if you are a girl and Marvel if you are a boy. You go to the parks as a child. You grow up, and perhaps you still go to the parks sometimes. Eventually, you get old, and now, you can choose to die in a Disney park designed by Imagineers and serviced by cast members just the same. You can realize this dream by living in Cotino. Truly, any American can be Disney-made … cradle-to-grave (if you are rich enough).
Regardless of the fate of these Disney ventures, they demonstrate a way of life — both one of the 2020s and a historical one of the American ethos. We get to choose where we live. Besides the obvious exceptions of Black Americans and Native Americans, most Americans’ ancestors chose to live in the United States — and at a smaller scale, I am in the minority of Floridians actually born in Florida. We want to immerse ourselves further and further into fantasy, but in a way, Americans have always done so even without the influence of Disney.
What bothers me most about Cotino is the financial, consumerist exchange. Disney will be up-charging these homes in the middle of the desert, almost asking for a real estate bust. People want to life a story life, and Disney is making you pay for that — for the rest of your life. Disney may have scammed people and overcharged them with the Galactic Starcruiser, but that was only for two nights. Cotino is for a lifetime.
Despite these critiques, Disney Storyliving is American to the core. You live in the frontier of the desert in a master-planned community insulated from the realities of the world. I would say that it is a very much excessive manifestation of the American freedom of movement, but it still is one.
I watch Cotino from the Sunshine State, a state whose culture and economy are inextricably tied to Disney. I see a replication of our way of life in Florida, and Disney had a major hand in creating that way of life. Manipulating your surroundings to maximize comfort is what we do in Florida, and Disney World did it in a theme park in Orlando. Now, Disney — our Dutch East India Company — is trying to proselytize that idea to the rest of the country: California, North Carolina, and wherever comes next.
We all live in gates in some manner. The oceans that flank the United States act as gates. We choose to live in neighborhoods — gated or non-gated — based on safety or better school districts. Personally, I live in a gated community. Cotino is a gated community too (although much more expensive), but I would say as we choose where we live and necessarily exclude and insulate ourselves from others, our way of life cannot be a complete fantasy.
What happens after “happily ever after”? Life happens. It doesn’t matter if you live in Cotino or anywhere else in the country. Wherever you are, there you are. Life should be somewhat of a fantasy. You live out and realize your dreams in your life, but Fantasyland and Magic Kingdom are for a day. It should not be for a lifetime.
I have to go now. I have to buzz in my Uber Eats driver to my gated community.
Although I grew up in Collier County and work there now, I live in Lee County — the county bordering Collier County to the north.