DESTIN, Florida- — The city no longer prohibits strip clubs, but that won't stop a legal battle to allow nude dancing at The Oasis pool hall on Mountain Drive, an attorney says.
The Destin City Council on Tuesday replaced the city's 1986 nude-dancing ban with an ordinance that allows, but heavily regulates, "sexually oriented businesses." The law requires background checks for all employees and a six-foot buffer between dancers and patrons. It also prohibits alcohol being bought or consumed on the premises.
Gary Edinger, the attorney for Terry Stephenson - who sued Destin in federal court last year after the city denied him a business license to turn The Oasis into a strip club - said that other than updating the lawsuit, the new ordinance changes nothing.
"The suit, as filed, concerned the original adult ordinance and the treatment of The Oasis' application to do business," Edinger said.
The charge that the city's goal, effectively, is to ban nude dancing remains the same, he said.
City Manager Greg Kisela said last month that Destin is ready to "spend a hundred thousand" fighting the case. The city even hired an Orlando attorney to help it defend itself.
The 1986 ordinance prohibited exposing genitals, buttocks or the female breast below the top of the areola in any business that sells alcohol to be consumed on the premises. City zoning also restricted sexually oriented businesses to industrial zoning - available only in two areas off Airport Road - and to sites at least 500 feet from homes.
After the city turned down Stephenson's business license in November, the council directed the city staff to draft a new law that could withstand a court challenge better than a complete ban.
The new rules keep adult entertainment confined to industrial zoning, but drop the 500-foot limit, which Kisela has said would confine Stephenson only to perhaps four or five sites.
"If we leave it as it is right now, courts will say, ‘It's too restrictive - you need to let him go on Mountain Drive,' " Kisela said last month.
Stephenson's lawsuit says the restrictions on adult entertainment are "a not so thinly veiled effort to eliminate nude dancing in the city" which violates the First Amendment because it "eliminates accessibility to erotic speech and expression."
The city says the new law only is intended to restrict "secondary harm," such as crime that some studies have tied to sexually oriented businesses.
The only discussion last week was whether changes in the law since the council took its first vote Jan. 5 - two votes are required to pass city ordinances - required the council to start over again at "first reading."
"We've had a Florida Supreme Court ruling that liberalized most of those standards," City Attorney Jerry Miller told the council. "They abandoned all previous law."
Miller said the changes to the ordinance, such as reducing the 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. allowed opening hours to 10 a.m. to 1 a.m., didn't change the intent or effect of the ordinance.
The council voted unanimously to pass the law.
