TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Only weeks after a Georgia county successfully put an adult boutique out of business by altering its zoning regulations for that specific purpose, politicians at another county in the South — Leon County, home of Florida state capital Tallahassee — are targeting adult businesses with a copycat argument.
This latest in a series of attacks on legitimate adult businesses was spearheaded by Leon County Commission Chairman Rick Minor who, according to local news outlet WFSU, believes that the shops could turn Tallahassee’s North Monroe Street into “a red light district.”
WFSU reported that Minor “is taking up arms against adult entertainment stores,” although he insists “he has no problems with them.”
The article reports that at the moment there are only three adult stores in the Tallahassee area and only two of them are on North Monroe.
"The last thing I think I want, or anyone who lives here wants, is a red light district in the most populous, most frequently — basically the highest-trafficked intersection in Tallahassee," Minor told WFSU.
His main target is the Hustler Store, a chain that prides itself on offering pleasure products in clean, well-lit stores to avoid being shunted to remote or blighted parts of town.
This openness appears to bother Minor the most, but in order to bypass the well-established principle that sexual expression is a Freedom of Speech issue covered by the First Amendment, politicians like Minor have to prove “secondary effects.”
“To regulate adult entertainment stores,” WFSU reports, “the commission must show they have secondary effects, such as increasing crime, blight or declining property values.”
'No or Uncertain Connection' to Crime
Today the commissioners “will review a report showing no, or uncertain, connection between these stores and rising crime. The report did not address blight or property value.”
In late October, Georgia's Cobb County Board of Commissioners permanently revoked the local business license for Atlanta-area adult boutique Tokyo Valentino.
The shuttering came after a protracted battle where county officials made the circular argument that adult businesses can only be zoned for high-crime areas because it’s been shown that there’s high crime in the areas where they are usually located.
Cobb County code amendments hastily passed earlier in September, reported local newspaper East Cobb News, “would limit sex shops and other adult businesses to two industrial zoning categories. All such businesses would be required to obtain a special license and employees would have to be issued a special permit.”
As XBIZ has been reporting, the onslaught of municipal harassment against Tokyo Valentino, and now a copycat motion regarding Tallahassee’s Hustler Hollywood, are being watched around the country as a bellwether for local moralists' strategies to restrict free access to sexual expression, education and products via regulatory and zoning issues.
