Santee Voters to Decide If City Will Be G-Rated

While most communities like to boast of their amenities, many residents in this East County city of 59,000 are proud of what they do not have.

There are no topless bars, X-rated movie theaters or adult bookstores in Santee . And, if an initiative on the June 3 ballot is passed, all such businesses would be kept out by law.

Proposition G, which would make it “unlawful to own, operate, construct or establish an adult entertainment establishment . . . within the city limits of Santee,” was placed on the ballot after nearly 4,000 residents signed petitions in favor of the initiative.

“I think 90% to 95% of the people in Santee want to keep it out completely,” said the Rev. Dorman Owens of the Santee Bible Missionary Fellowship, which backed the petition drive.

“When you bring pornography into a town, you bring in the slime, the sleaze, the child molesters, the prostitutes and the homosexuals,” Owens said. “It attracts them like a magnet.”

The drive to ban adult entertainment began in 1984, after the owners of the Main Attraction--a Mission Valley nightclub featuring topless dancing--applied to open a similar club in Santee. The application had to be permitted under the county ordinance in effect in Santee at the time, so the City Council placed a two-year moratorium on all adult businesses, to give the city’s planning staff time to draft its own ordinance.

The moratorium was struck down by a U.S. District Court judge in January, 1985, as an unreasonable infringement on First Amendment rights, which protect topless dancing as a means of free expression. The city was allowed by the court to ban adult entertainment for 150 days, while planners worked to come up with a law that would be stringent enough to satisfy church groups but still pass constitutional muster.

That ordinance, approved by the City Council last May, is the most restrictive in the county and kept the Main Attraction from opening on the site the owners had chosen. The law confines adult entertainment businesses to a 3,200-foot-long strip on Woodside Avenue North, and prohibits such businesses from being within 1,000 feet of a church or school and within 600 feet of another adult business establishment.

But as tough as Santee’s adult entertainment ordinance is, it doesn’t go far enough for many residents.

“The zoning ordinance does restrict them a lot,” said resident Tom Burleigh, “but it’s not really reflecting what the people of Santee have for community standards. I believe the community standards call for a ban.”

The City Council has refused to enact a prohibition on adult entertainment, on the advice of City Atty. Gloria McLean that an outright ban would be easy prey to a legal challenge. That opinion was seconded by attorney Steven Hartwell, an associate professor at the University of San Diego law school who was consulted by city officials.

“Santee, in protecting the quality of urban life, can regulate adult entertainment as to time, place and manner,” Hartwell said. “ . . . But they cannot totally ban adult entertainment any more than they can totally ban other protected speech activities like picketing, newspapers, political meetings or church services.”

Proponents of the ban, however, say the city should be willing to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to fight for citizens’ rights to codify their community standards.

“It would set a precedent and make it easier for other cities to keep out adult entertainment,” Burleigh said. “The court is becoming more conservative, so hopefully they’ll get things back the way they ought to be.”

Or the Supreme Court could just as easily strike down the ordinance, argues City Councilman Mike Clark, who does not support the ban because of fiscal concerns.

“My one question is, How much money is this city willing to spend to fight this to the end?” Clark said. “We could spend $400,000 to take this to the Supreme Court, only to have them say it’s unconstitutional. I think the amount of money that would be spent fighting this would be depriving other areas of the community.”

Clark has come under fire from religious groups for opposing the adult entertainment ban. He said he shares other Santee residents’ objections to pornography but recognizes the legal restraints on keeping it out of town.

“I commend them for their efforts, but I’m looking at what the law says and what I was elected to do, which is to uphold the Constitution,” Clark said.

But Owens, whose group pickets outside the Pussycat Theater in El Cajon every Friday night, believes that “law is subject to righteousness.”

“A good law never protects that which would destroy society,” Owens said. “The First Amendment was never intended to protect crime or pornography that ruins minds. . . . All these sleazy perverts and unrighteous people have stretched the Constitution to protect their particular sins, and it was never intended to that.”