City Undergoes Sex Policy Change

By Gene Williams
Staff Writer

October 13 -- The City Council Tuesday night took steps to get the kinks out of regulating what is kinky in Santa Monica, revamping a 25 year-old City ordinance governing sexually-oriented businesses.

In a separate motion, the council also directed staff to come up with new rules to keep massage parlors from serving as brothels.

The move comes six months after worried residents organized in Sunset Park in an effort to prevent the opening of Secret Desires, a 10,000 square-foot pleasure palace selling sexy lingerie and erotic novelties at 2414 Lincoln Boulevard.

But the new ordinance will have little if any effect on the handful of adult businesses already operating in Santa Monica, nor will it prevent more from moving in. In fact, it opens up more areas where they will be allowed.

Noting that the First Amendment protects the sale of sexually explicit materials, the ordinance is a balancing act between business rights and neighborhood concerns.

Under the old rules, porn proprietors were supposed to locate along parts of Lincoln and Pico boulevards and on a few blocks east of the downtown between 5th and 7th Streets.

(Ironically, of the three stores currently selling adult materials in town, Secret Desires is both the only one located in an area zoned for adult businesses and the only one to generate a lot of complaints.)

Under the new ordinance, the Bayside, the Light Manufacturing and Studio District and other commercial and manufacturing areas will also be opened to purveyors of sexually explicit materials.

Expanding the territory is necessary to fend off possible legal challenges from those who would contend that the City is using discriminatory zoning practices to keep the businesses out, City Attorney Marsha Moutrie said.

The ordinance, however, does acknowledge that adult businesses tend to bring crime, lewd behavior and decreased property values in areas where they locate.

To regulate these businesses and mitigate the negative “secondary impacts” they create, the existing spacing requirements have been maintained. No two establishments of a sexual nature can be closer than 1,000 feet apart or within 500 feet of a school, church or residential area.

But unlike the old ordinance, the new rules more clearly define what constitutes “adult entertainment use,” a term the City has used for years to define a wide variety of sexually oriented businesses from stores to cabarets to movie theaters.

Vague language that describes businesses dedicated to Eros as ones that “specialize” or have a “significant” quantity of sex items has been replaced with objective standards defining an adult business as one in which sexual materials constitute 30 percent or more its trade.

In addition, the new regulations make it easier for the City to impose conditions on the businesses and more difficult for operators transfer licenses.

While neighborhood groups pushing for stiffer rules have generally applauded the new ordinance, residents who live near Secret Desires worry that the 30 percent threshold will not be enough to protect their neighborhood.

“Imagine a ten-foot newsstand with three feet of porn magazines,” Nina Fresco, a landmarks commissioner and a neighbor of Secret Desires, told the council Tuesday. “Does that seem like a discreet enough proportion of trade to be unregulated?

“When my two boys reach an age where they’re hiding girly magazines under their mattresses, I want them to go farther than ten feet away from home to acquire them,” she added.

Fresco and Eric Gabster -- who helped organize an ad hoc citizens committee and rallied neighborhood groups early this year to fight the new sex store -- told the council they would like to see that number lowered to 20 percent.

But City Attorneys Moutrie and Barry Rosenbaum cautioned the council that thresholds of 20 percent and lower have been successfully challenged in other cities, whereas 30 percent thresholds have been upheld.

After a motion to made Council member McKeown and backed by Council member Ken Genser to impose the stiffer standards suggested by residents failed, the new ordinance passed unanimously.

“We’re happy that the ordinance does allow for more and easier enforcement of the adult entertainment code,” Gabster remarked after the meeting.

“It would be nice if it were more restrictive, but we understand the City’s concern over case law that could overturn more stringent provisions.”