Judge's ruling could clear way for strip club

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Orange and Brown
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Judge's ruling could clear way for strip club

Post by Orange and Brown »

WRITTEN BY JIM PHILLIPS
FRIDAY, 04 JUNE 2010 16:35

After more than a year and a half of waiting for a lawsuit over a zoning board decision to be resolved, the city of Athens may once again be facing the prospect of a strip club opening on Stimson Avenue.

In a decision issued Wednesday, Athens County Common Pleas Judge Michael Ward vacated rulings by the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals, which had rejected a permit for a private “gentleman’s club,” featuring nude dancers, proposed for a Stimson Avenue storefront that most recently has been home to a small used-car dealership.

An attorney for the company that wants to open the club said Friday that he expects his client, the Shade-based Three Wide Entertainment, to try again.

“Without having spoken to my client in depth about that, I would say yes, we are going to re-file (for a zoning permit),” predicted attorney Scott Mergenthaler. Athens Law Director Pat Lang said the city will fight the ruling, and possibly will try to block any new permit while the legal dispute continues.

“The city of Athens is disappointed with this ruling, and you’d better believe we’re going to appeal (to the 4th District Court of Appeals),” Lang said. While the appeal is pending, he said, “My guess is that we’re going to file for a stay in Common Pleas Court,” to block issuance of any new permit.

In his ruling, Ward wrote that transcripts of the hearings in which the BZA heard and turned down the permit request “cast serious doubt on whether all board members fully understood and applied the correct legal standards to the issues.”

Evidence of this “confusion,” the judge wrote, included statements by one board member suggesting the member “appeared to believe (the) proposal could or should be denied simply because it involved ‘immorality.’”

Another board member, Ward noted, “at one point indicated it was the board’s job to determine, in relation to the proposed use, ‘what is appropriate for the community.’”

This is emphatically not the board’s job, the judge noted, but rather the job of City Council in adopting zoning codes.

“The board’s job was not to determine if (Three Wide’s) proposed type of entertainment is appropriate for the community, but simply to determine whether… it is a principally permitted entertainment enterprise within the meaning of (the appropriate section of city zoning code),” he pointed out.

Ward vacated two decisions issued by the BZA in March 2008 and June 2009, in which the board denied Three Wide’s permit applications. He noted in his ruling that this does not automatically grant Three Wide a permit, nor require the BZA to approve one; instead, it “merely vacates the board’s decision, returning the parties to the starting point.”

Mergenthaler said he considers the ruling “well written, and was pretty much what we asked for all along. We just wanted them to decide what the permitted uses were, as defined in the zoning code.”

He said by his reading, Ward rejected the notion apparently held by some BZA members, that they could reject a strip club because they felt it didn’t fit in with the general character of the community.

“I think he was saying, ‘You don’t have to have two other strip clubs in town before you can put a strip club there,’” Mergenthaler speculated.

The lawsuit over the strip club has been awaiting Ward’s ruling since both sides filed their final briefs in the case in November 2008.

The building in which Three Wide wants to open its club is owned by Demetrios Prokos. He had wanted to rent the site to a restaurant that had a drive-thru window, but the city would not allow that use at the site, because this use is not permitted at the site because of its proximity to a residentially zoned neighborhood.

After this refusal, Three Wide submitted an application to the city in December 2007, seeking permission to open a “private club/assembly hall” in part of the building.

After city officials repeatedly rejected Three Wide’s proposal in various guises, the company appealed the BZA ruling administratively to the Common Pleas Court.

In his ruling, Ward said the board was faced with two questions: First, did a strip club fit within any of the legally permitted uses for a B-3 zone – which include “nightclub,” “theater” and “entertainment”? And if not, did the proposed use at least have the “same general character” as any of the listed legal uses?

In answering these questions, Ward wrote, at least some board members seem to have used the wrong legal standards.

Some members, he suggested, seemed to believe the issue before them was whether a strip club had the same general character as “existing, planned or hoped-for businesses/uses in the Stimson Avenue neighborhood.” But the actual legal question, he noted, was whether a strip club had the same general character as the listed permitted uses for the zone.

One member seemed to think that finding the proposed use was a permitted use in a B-3 zone would have the same effect as granting a variance – a view Ward noted is false, because a variance specifically allows a non-permitted use.

The judge granted that some material in the hearing transcripts indicates “the board may have understood its role and the applicable legal standards.”

However, he added, “the overwhelming sentiments expressed by board members and hearing participants were distaste for the content of (Three Wide’s) proposed entertainment, and fear of Stimson Avenue becoming an area fostering vice and concomitant moral, physical and economic harm to nearby families, traditional businesses, and the ‘plan for the neighborhood.’”

But, Ward wrote, these concerns properly were the business of City Council to address, not the BZA, which “strayed from merely making the comparison called for by (city code), into considerations of whether (the) protected activity was good for the community.”

He also noted that stripping is clearly protected expression under the First Amendment, and any city action that suppresses or restricts access to First Amendment-protected activity “is constitutionally suspect.”

In a nod to opponents of the club, however, Ward wrote that he finds the BZA’s rulings “unreasonable only in a legal sense. The board was not unreasonable in showing concern about the potential deleterious effects of a strip club on Stimson Avenue. The overwhelming neighborhood sentiment opposing this use should not be, and was not by this board, taken lightly. One need not be prudish to understand the concerns of area families, businesses, and school officials in having a strip/nude dance club in their midst.”


Tigercannon71
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Re: Judge's ruling could clear way for strip club

Post by Tigercannon71 »

I think its a great idea for a strip club in Athens. Those young hot women that go to college should have a chance to earn money for college through the art of dancing.


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Jughe@d
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Re: Judge's ruling could clear way for strip club

Post by Jughe@d »

tigercannon71 wrote:I think its a great idea for a strip club in Athens. Those young hot women that go to college should have a chance to earn money for college through the art of dancing.
LOL :lol:
I feel bad for laughing, but still :lol:


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1987chieftains
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Re: Judge's ruling could clear way for strip club

Post by 1987chieftains »

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: art of dancing :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:


ironmen1987
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Re: Judge's ruling could clear way for strip club

Post by ironmen1987 »

Just love it when a group can use our judicial system to show them all the loopholes...


Burg_Grad_77
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Re: Judge's ruling could clear way for strip club

Post by Burg_Grad_77 »

I don't see a thing wrong with a girl working in a place like this to help further her education or feed her family. My brother and I and a couple freinds were at the Doll House in Columbus a few years back and after paying for a lap dance with this very beautiful young girl we got to talking to her and she was was 25, married with a young son and she was paying her way through Capitol Law School with what she earned dancing. She said she made around $2000 a week and I say that's some darn serious money.


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