A dozen years later, that time may have arrived. While Disneyland represents only about 5 percent of a massive media company that includes ABC, ESPN, and Pixar Animation Studios, the resort is still the flagship, and its growth is essential to the company's future. Disneyland is the second-largest piece of Disney's parks-and-resorts division, a $9.9 billion oasis with 20 percent profit margins that provides steady cash flow for a company whose revenue can be volatile. And while its younger corporate brother, Florida's Disney World, is built on four large and thriving parks, Disneyland, accompanied by the less popular California Adventure, badly needs to grow.

Attendance in Anaheim has lagged. According to the company, Disneyland had 14.7 million visitors in 2006, nearly 2 million fewer than Disney World. And attendance was up only 1.2 percent from the previous year—less than half the 3 percent growth rate for Disney World.

If Disneyland is to keep up, it needs to expand. Disney executives are convinced they need to stop new housing in the resort district or else lose control of their destiny.

But Disney's once-cozy ties to the city have become frayed. Longtime employees who had good civic relationships have retired or departed. Disney, which has theme parks in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Paris, replaced those local officials with executives from its parks and divisions around the world. This evolution was not part of any plan but was instead an inevitable, if unfortunate, by-product of the company's growth. Anaheim was now merely one of Disney's outposts, albeit an important one.

A MICKEY MOUSE BATTLE An aerial map shows Disneyland and the resort district. Photograph by: Steve Granitz (Mickey Mouse)

Although the new executives knew theme parks, they didn't know Orange County, where Anaheim is located. Steven Greenhut, the senior editorial writer and columnist of the Orange County Register and a leading opinionmaker in the county, recently marveled in print that in nine years at the paper, he has had "virtually no dealing with the company."

By the time Disneyland celebrated its 50th anniversary, in 2005, one of its few executives with strong local ties was Chris Lowe, a former mayor of the Orange County city of Placentia, who had taken over the resort's government-affairs job in 2004.

"In the past five years, the company has evolved into a global organization, and the senior management moves between different locations," Lowe says. "That's been a problem for Disney. It's the growing pains of our company going global."

As Disney was distracted, Anaheim was changing.