Simi Residents Protest Plans for Nude Dance Club

Outraged residents Thursday night attacked plans for a nude dance club with hostility, disgust and threats to leave town if the club is built.

“This is a family community, and this is not a family business,” resident Beverly Lopez told a neighborhood review panel in the first public hearing on the dance club plans. “We don’t want it--period.”

Her husband, Joe Lopez, added, “I expect we’ll stay in this community--that is unless the community becomes corrupted by an establishment like this.”

Club developer Philip Young put on a 20-minute, high-tech slide show promising that his Mirages Cabaret would be as unobtrusive as possible and would bring more business to surrounding merchants. These include a doughnut shop, a bikini boutique and a gun store.

Armed with computerized sketches of the club’s interior and the “Meese Commission’s Report on Pornography,” Young rejected allegations that the club would boost incidents of crimes, including rape, in the west Simi Valley neighborhood.

He cited the neighborhood surrounding the Spearmint Rhino, a nude cabaret that opened last year in an industrial area of Oxnard, saying neighbors’ fears there of a jump in crime never materialized. And he brushed aside concerns that the marriages of his patrons would be hurt by what they saw.

“It’s just a gamble,” Young said of his dream to open an adult cabaret in conservative Simi Valley. “I just had a gut feeling it could work. This is a pretty dry place, there’s nothing happening and they roll up the sidewalks at night.”

Asked to describe a typical performance by one of the female dancers, Young said, “They’re going to come out with a bikini top on. They’ll take that off, then they’ll take the bottom off toward the end of the second song, and then the lights will dim and you probably won’t be able to see anything anyway.”

After council members quizzed Young on everything from liquor licenses (he does not plan to pursue one) to whether the club’s sign would display dancers’ lewd names (he promised it would not), residents of Neighborhood Council No. 1 lined up to criticize the plan.

Longtime club opponent Steve Frank criticized Young’s crime statistics, citing other reports that showed higher crime rates near adult-oriented businesses in cities such as Cleveland, Indianapolis and Phoenix.

Resident Lynda Wurtz said she would rather move her family, including daughters age 15 and 18, to Colorado than live near Young’s club.

“If businesses like this are allowed to move in, I and people like me will leave,” Wurtz said. “And you’ll lose your hard-working, middle-class people.” Urban decay, she added, “will spread just like a cancer.”

Other critics denounced the crime statistics and reports that Young quoted as “absolutely false and bogus.” Local Pastor Norman Walker, a father of seven, is opening a bible study center near the proposed club site that could scuttle Young’s plans. Walker said he has seen evidence that the club could be harmful.

“I have counseled men and women in my office who have experienced serious sexual dysfunction in their marriage on the part of one person or another because of the use of pornography,” Walker said.

All 10 council members voted to recommend that the Simi Valley Valley Planning Commission deny Young a permit to open the club.

Young, a real estate manager and electronics engineer, has been pushing for a nude dance club permit here since 1991. When planning conflicts shot down plans for his original site, he took his dream to another location--a two-story building surrounded by mini-malls on western Los Angeles Avenue.

The new Mirages Cabaret plan immediately met strong opposition in the family oriented town.

Opponents quickly fell in step behind Steve Frank, leader of Simi Citizens R Against Pornography.

SCRAP held a candlelight rally, gathered signatures for petitions, wrote letters to City Hall and local newspapers, and drafted pastors to preach anti-porn sermons to their flocks.

City Hall listened.

Realizing they could not ban nude dance clubs outright, the City Council in October jumped to quash “lap dancing,” “table dancing” and other close contact between patrons and naked dancers.

But rather than a total ban that could violate free speech rights, the council changed city codes to restrict dancers to perform only on a permanent stage at least 30 inches high and 3 feet from the nearest spectator.

Then last month, city planners found legal cause to reject the Mirages Cabaret plan: It was too close to Walker’s recently approved bible center and a karate classroom catering to children.

Young has vowed to pursue his application for a business permit at a Planning Commission meeting in March--though city planners say the club would very likely be rejected.

After that, Young said, he will press a lawsuit already in federal court that seeks to force the city to approve his plans.

Young has even taken his battle to the Internet, by e-mailing pleas for support to 100 Simi Valley residents under his America Online handle, “Good Lap.”

About a third of them e-mailed back--20 in favor and six or seven against, he has said.

“The self-righteous folks keep warning that men will tend to rape women after seeing them naked. These people are sick people,” Young’s electronic letter said in part. “We all know hat 99% of the people who go to strip clubs are normal people. Yes, there may be a pervert or two, but you don’t think there are any perverts which go to church? Do not be naive . . . Strip clubs have their place in society, it is part of American culture which no one can deny.”