Longmont – Hard-rock music rattles the walls one recent Friday night at Bella’s Cabaret.
Two dancers, barely out of high school, undulate beneath dim colored lights on oval stages at each end of the club – a former Asian restaurant not much bigger than a convenience store.
By the end of a three-song set, the girls are naked, bumping and grinding for a scattering of men nursing $7 nonalcoholic drinks.
Like the music ringing in people’s ears outside, the club’s presence on Main Street has reverberated in City Hall and in the courts for years.
The City Council has wielded zoning restrictions, adopted eight months after the club opened in 2001, to try to oust the club from its prime location to someplace more discreet.
Like Longmont, growing communities across the Front Range are grappling with how to accommodate the free-speech rights of clubs without accommodating flesh peddlers – a tricky balance, with local politics always in play.
Recently, Parker updated the town’s zoning code to allow strip clubs, massage parlors, peep shows and adult bookstores.
Town leaders said they had to designate a place for such businesses to protect the town from legal action. Other communities go to court anyway, even if they probably will lose.
“They can go to court with taxpayers’ money,” said Mike Grimm, owner of the Landing Strip topless bar in Commerce City. “And then when the judge makes them do what they’re supposed to, they can blame the judge.”
Legally, bans are not an option.
“The Supreme Court says you can’t ban them, but you can limit where they locate and restrict how they do business,” said Parker Police Chief Tom Cornelius, who wrote the town’s new code.
Still, Longmont and other communities continue to take their battles through the judicial system, citing studies that show adult businesses spur crime.
Last year, Bella’s and the town’s only other adult business, Mile Hi Emporium bookstore, won a lawsuit against the city, allowing them to stay put on Main Street.
The city has appealed after spending tens of thousands of dollars on legal help. But while Longmont is losing the expensive court fight, it does little to impose rules that it can enforce.
Local law says dancers must be 3 feet from patrons, but at Bella’s, women pressed their breasts into customers’ faces. Tips are supposed to go in a box instead of a dancer’s garter, but the rule is flouted.
The manager is supposed to have a view of the entire club, but the doorman hawks memberships to a private VIP lounge for an extra five bucks.
Bella’s has never been cited.
“The city is still grappling with how to enforce the operational requirements of the code,” city attorney Clay Douglas said.
In May, the Parker Town Council tried to head off legal problems but still ignited a political ruckus.
The zoning code had made it nearly impossible for sexually oriented businesses to operate in Parker. Rather than risk losing in court, the council loosened the restrictions.
A flourishing bedroom community with 37,000 residents, Parker promotes an image of a wholesome community with nothing but nice families with lots of children.
Adult businesses?
“I don’t want them. I think it’s garbage,” said town Councilman and former Mayor Gary Lasater, who voted to open the town to potential adult businesses.
The town picked the minimum sites the law would allow in a light industrial area with relatively high rents. Lasater said he had no choice.
“If we simply ban it, and they want to put in right next door to the ice cream shop on Mainstreet, if they take us to court and win, guess what? We have a strip joint … next to the ice cream shop,” he said.
Grimm knows all about such tactics. Commerce City has tried to kill his business for years, he said.
He has shelled out about $70,000 in legal fees, he estimates.
“The First Amendment gives me this right, and I’m not giving it up,” he said.
Over the years, Grimm and the city have reached compromises on how close the dancers can get to patrons. In 1995, the town gave him a 10-year exception on a requirement of a 1,000-foot separation from the nearest home, church, school or park. That exception runs out this fall.
“They’ll be back,” Grimm said.
Maybe, maybe not, said Mayor Sean Ford. He hasn’t heard anyone complaining about Grimm or his 20-year-old business.
“He’s been there forever, and there haven’t been any problems that I know of,” Ford said.
But the mayor notes that the town’s policies and enforcement have kept a lid on problems. Commerce City has only three adult businesses, the same number as a decade ago, despite 40 percent growth in that span.
When and where an adult businesses locates are no different than for any other enterprise – the chance to make money is the driving force, experts say.
“It’s a marketplace thing,” said Denver lawyer Michael Gross, who has represented businesses in most of Colorado’s highestprofile cases, including Bella’s and the Landing Strip.
“Let citizens vote with their pocketbooks,” he said. A business that has nothing the community wants won’t last long, he added.
Yet such legal battles can have a chilling effect. Denver strip club mogul Troy Lowrie apparently has learned a lesson from tussles with towns.
“If a city doesn’t want me there, I don’t want to be there,” he said.
Lowrie paid a high price in Sheridan the past few years as he tried to bring all-nude dancing to his All Stars Sports Cabaret. After financing a successful recall election in 2003 to remove council members who opposed all-nude dancing, he got the law changed. But residents reversed the decision in a referendum.
Lowrie wound up paying an undisclosed settlement to ousted council member Vicki Johnson, who claimed she was slandered and libeled by Lowrie.
Johnson said Parker leaders were wise to plan before an adult business comes calling.
“You have to stay ahead of all the dirty tricks,” she said.
Famed First Amendment attorney Arthur Schwartz of Denver expects communities to take a last stand against adult businesses in the coming years, but the legal battles are fading.
The argument against obscenity hasn’t changed in his 50-year career in defending businesses: community standards. Today, the Internet and cable TV make sexually oriented material available to every home in America.
“Whatever you want, it’s already there,” he said.
Community values, meanwhile, evolve. In Colorado in the 1950s, it was illegal to sell a picture of a semi-nude woman, Schwartz said. Today, there’s raunchier fare in tabloids displayed in a grocery store checkout line, he added.
Retired Air Force Col. Curt Dale won’t surrender Douglas County without a fight.
Dale led a cavalry of residents who jammed Town Hall when the Parker council took up the adult-business zoning issue. If an adult business wants to come to Parker, it will find an unwelcome populace, he said.
“The law’s law, but smut is smut,” he said.
But for Holly Lee, a mother of two in Parker, all the fighting is meaningless.
“I don’t go to those businesses,” she said, “so I don’t care what goes on inside.”
Staff writer Joey Bunch can be reached at 303-820-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com.
