Oxnard to Consider Anti-Porn Ordinance : Planning: The proposal drafted by a national group would restrict most adult businesses to the city’s east side.

The Oxnard Planning Commission tonight will consider an ordinance drafted by a national anti-pornography group that would restrict most adult businesses to industrial areas on the city’s east side.

Under terms of the draft ordinance, sexually oriented businesses would not be allowed to open within 1,000 feet of any church, school, youth facility, park, public building or residential area.

The same restrictions would apply to adult motels, but the motels would be allowed within commercial areas and the central business district.

In a memo to the commission, however, Assistant City Atty. Paula Kimbrell warned that the ordinance could be vulnerable to a legal challenge and recommended relaxing some of the measure’s restrictions.

“The city attorney recommends that the Planning Commission . . . eliminate provisions that may be susceptible to successful legal challenge,” Kimbrell wrote. Among the provisions she identified as vulnerable are a requirement that an applicant disclose prior criminal convictions and previously suspended or revoked licenses, mandatory inspections and an order for such businesses to close between 2 and 6 a.m.

Under the proposed ordinance, the city’s two existing adult bookstores would have to close or relocate within a year.

If planners approve the proposal, it would go before the City Council within a month. An interim measure now in effect, which bans new adult businesses near key entry points to the city, expires in September.

The ordinance was drafted by Janet LaRue, senior counsel to the Virginia-based National Law Center for Children and Families, an affiliate of the National Coalition Against Pornography, an alliance of 70 religious and private organizations.

The proposal then was advanced by the Oxnard Adult Uses Ad Hoc Committee, a citizens group formed by the City Council in the wake of controversy over the council’s approval of an adult bookstore permit on a high-profile stretch of Vineyard Avenue.

Opponents of the adult bookstore, led by Rev. Darcy Taylor, dominated the eight-member committee, which met for a year to study how to minimize the undesirable side effects of adult businesses.

The National Law Center for Children and Families provided legal assistance to the committee, providing research on the effects of adult businesses in other cities and submitting a 60-page memorandum that outlined what restrictions have survived court tests elsewhere.

After the center submitted a first draft, the committee rejected proposed bans on the sale of sexual devices in Oxnard, on the advice of Kimbrell.

The version adopted by the committee, though, retained a number of requirements for adult business owners that Kimbrell found objectionable. After a meeting Wednesday between planning commissioners and city staff, Taylor said the proposed ordinance meets the needs of residents and adult business owners.

“This is a long-term process to balance the rights for adult businesses and the rights of the citizens,” Taylor said.

Representatives of Oxnard’s two existing adult bookstores said Wednesday that neither the committee nor the National Law Center for Children and Families proved that the bookstores pose a problem in the city.

Robert A. DePiano of Los Angeles, an attorney who represents one of Oxnard’s adult bookstores, said the committee’s members reflected too narrow a viewpoint, and criticized the role of the National Law Center for Children and Families.

Representatives of the center “are parading around from city to city to see who will allow themselves to be a guinea pig,” DePiano said. “Each time, they make the proposed ordinance a little more restrictive and take it to the next city.”