City Seeks to Stem Influx of Massage Parlors

San Juan Capistrano residents are witnessing another migration to this South County town--and this time it isn’t the swallows.

It’s massage parlors.

“We’ve become a target for illegitimate massage activities,” City Atty. Richard Denhalter said. “They are effectively shutting down massage activities in other cities, and we’ve experienced that flight coming here.”

During the past 18 months, the number of business licenses issued for masseuses and massage parlors jumped from 14 to 56--a 300% increase.

Since July 1994, the city has recorded eight arrests for prostitution at massage parlors--up from zero during the year before. Although authorities say the majority of massage operations are legitimate, the 16 prostitution cases investigated during the past 1 1/2 years have city officials alarmed.

“The number of massage parlors is way out of proportion with our population,” Denhalter said of the city’s 28,000 residents. “We feel bad that legitimate businesses are getting stigmatized.”

To squelch the proliferation of illegal massage activities, the City Council tonight will consider imposing tougher regulations on existing massage operations and a moratorium on new ones. The move would make city regulations similar to county laws.

“We want to make sure we’re in front of the problem,” City Manager George Scarborough said. “It’s a disturbing trend.”

For the city’s professional massage therapists, the move couldn’t be more welcome.

“It’s about time,” said Sherry Laursen, who has operated Sherry Laursen & Associates, a massage therapy clinic, for the past 10 years. “I’m totally for regulating the profession and for bringing massage therapy out for what it truly is: a preventive medicine that heals and helps people.”

Currently, the city requires only that massage businesses have valid business licenses and masseurs have degrees in massage therapy.

“However, we’ve discovered they can get those by mail-order,” Denhalter said.

The new ordinance would require all masseuses applying for a business license to have five years’ experience in the profession and would prohibit them from engaging in “immoral practices” with their clients.

It also would toughen background checks on prospective masseurs by handing that task over to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. The city now handles those checks.

At the same time, the moratorium, which could last as long as two years, would give the city time to come up with a new zoning ordinance regulating the location of massage businesses, said Thomas Tomlinson, the city’s planning director.

Currently, the neighboring cities of Laguna Niguel, Mission Viejo, Dana Point and San Clemente regulate the businesses through their zoning ordinances, Tomlinson said.

Meanwhile, city officials will closely monitor other cities facing similar problems, including Newport Beach. Last month, six massage businesses filed a lawsuit against that city, alleging that a 1994 law regulating their operations was an attempt to shut them down.

“We’re watching their litigation to see how it goes,” Denhalter said. “We don’t want to reinvent the wheel on this.”