Council Says Sex Club Law Is Premature

A warning sign or a welcome mat?

That was the debate as City Council members considered writing and adopting a law governing X-rated movie houses, sex toy shops and cabarets.

Councilwoman Linda Parks--who proposed drafting an ordinance now while Thousand Oaks is free of salacious adult entertainment--said a law would serve as a deterrent against such businesses.

But the majority of her colleagues shot her down on a 3-2 vote at Tuesday night’s council meeting. They contended that an ordinance on the books is as good as an invitation in the mail to anyone wanting to open such a business.

“I’d rather have an ordinance in my back pocket and ready to go” than have one on the books, said Councilwoman Judy Lazar, who opposed Parks’ proposal along with colleagues Andy Fox and Mayor Mike Markey.

“I don’t want to send a message to sexually oriented businesses that they are welcome here,” Lazar added during the meeting. “In fact, you want to send the opposite message: They aren’t welcome here. We don’t want them. But we will accommodate them if we have to.”

Spurred in part by the experience of sister city Simi Valley--enmeshed in a costly legal battle over a proposed strip club--Parks had argued that now was the time to write a tough, restrictive law. But others said an ordinance could be a road map to would-be business proprietors.

Parks was visibly frustrated with her colleagues’ dissent.

Saying she borrowed the idea from former council candidate Dan del Campo, Parks warned her peers that they would be caught unprepared if an applicant appeared.

“As far as I can see, they thought that any ordinance that would restrict [the businesses] would encourage them,” she said Wednesday. “I don’t quite understand this logic.”

Given that she and Councilwoman Elois Zeanah--usually the minority voices on this polarized council--were on the losing end of Tuesday’s vote, Parks accused her colleagues of playing politics.

On the contrary, Fox said that the majority just preferred a different means to the common end: deterring X-rated enterprises in Thousand Oaks, home of the nation’s first Club Disney.

“We all want to discourage that type of business,” he said. “But if you’re considering an application, is it better to have something on the books, where, if someone meets the criteria, we have to allow them? Another approach is to have [a law] ready to go and then wait and see. . . . Let them put their cards on the table first.”

If a strip club were to request a special use permit, Fox and others have said, the city could impose a limited moratorium on adult businesses--thus buying time to write an appropriate law.

City Atty. Mark Sellers and his staff have written a few draft ordinances on the matter since 1993--but the council has never officially voted on one, he said.

Right now, Thousand Oaks’ raciest businesses consist of video stores that have back rooms stocked with adult movies.

The city already has some protection against salacious businesses, Sellers said. Any entertainment business--strip clubs included--must detail its hours of operation, parking, security and the like before receiving a special use permit from the city.

From a city official’s standpoint, writing a law about massage parlors, sex toy shops, strip clubs and adult movie houses is a dicey proposition.

Cities cannot ban the businesses outright, because federal judges have ruled them worthy of 1st Amendment protection. But in the interest of curbing prostitution and crime, which seem to follow such businesses, cities are allowed to dictate where an adults-only enterprise can locate.

Striking a balance between those two demands has vexed Simi Valley--which is tangled up in a legal battle over its most recent law that barred adults-only businesses within 1,000 feet of a school or house of worship or within 500 feet of a business catering to youth. A federal judge recently struck the law down as unconstitutional; the city is appealing that decision.

Simi Valley Mayor Greg Stratton said he could see the merits of writing an ordinance now as well as holding off until later.

“I guess [holding off] is kind of an interesting approach,” Stratton said. “I can understand it from the sense that none of us know what a good ordinance is because the courts haven’t told us.”

At the same time, he said, judges turn “a jaundiced eye” to laws written about sexually oriented businesses only after a proprietor has tried to open one.

“It would seem to me that you’d want to write at least a very benign law now that would set up a process,” he said. “So if someone applies, you have time to react.”

Sellers said other complicated questions exist when writing laws about adult businesses: Should adult businesses be located in commercial or industrial areas? And would it be better to cluster them in one area or scatter them?

“There’s a number of different approaches,” he said. “Each one has its good points and bad points.”