BY NICK DIAMANTIDES
Staff Writer
A new adult-entertainment club is coming to Signal Hill in the near future, and city officials say they can’t do anything about it. While details of how the club will operate and what it will offer are scant, one thing is clear: total nudity will be on display.
Dubbed the Palms Adult Club, the facility will open at 2540 Palm Drive (former site of Bixby Knolls Party Rentals) sometime soon. Owner George Cataloiu of GC Brothers Entertainment LLC recently acquired an adult-entertainment permit from the city.
Signal Hill City Manager Ken Farfsing said that nothing can be done to prevent the club from opening in Signal Hill. “It used to be that 20 years ago, cities tried to prohibit adult entertainment, which would include strip clubs and the like, but since then cities have come to realize that it is a waste of time and money to fight them,” he said.
Farfsing explained that up until the late 1980s, many cities tried to prohibit adult clubs entirely, setting up zoning laws that made it impossible for such facilities to exist within a certain city’s boundaries. He added that adult-club owners fought back by banding together and hiring attorneys who filed federal court cases alleging civil rights violations.
According to Farfsing, the club owners claimed they were denied their first-amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of expression. “They were successful in having a city zoning ordinance overturned that prohibited these adult entertainment uses,” he said. “The United States Supreme Court basically sent guidelines to the cities saying that they (the cities) needed to provide some type of areas for these adult-entertainment uses to go into.”
Then municipal governments tried a new tactic. “The cities decided to put them into places like manufacturing zones where there would be the least amount of harm to residences, schools and churches,” Farfsing said. “But the cities also decided that they allow the use under conditional use permits, which required public hearings.”
In response, lawyers for the adult-entertainment industry also fought that requirement all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. “The Court said, ‘No, you can’t do that— you are basically trying to set up your ordinances so the public can come and scream and yell and the city council will turn these uses down and we don’t feel that is the right thing to do’,” Farfsing said. “So basically the court was saying that if you can have a factory in a manufacturing zone, you can also have adult entertainment, and you cannot have public hearings to decide the issue.”
Farfsing then described more court cases which determined that the most cities could do is require that adult-entertainment clubs not be closer than 1,000 feet from schools, homes, or churches.
“The laws have been changing all the time and we have been trying to keep our ordinance current,” Farfsing said. ” We had a situation several years ago when we tried to prohibit the Fantasy Castle (an adult-entertainment club) from coming in, but we found that our ordinance could not do that.”
Farfsing noted that several years ago the city, in its zoning ordinance, identified two manufacturing areas where such clubs could go. One was on Walnut Avenue, and the other was on Palm Drive.
“We have had a lot of experience with this, and although we don’t like it, we cannot go against federal case law,” Farfsing said. “The attorney who represents the adult-business owners in Southern California is a gentleman named John Roger Diamond, who is a world-renowned expert on First Amendment protection and he has successfully argued such cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Farfsing added that he, the city attorney and planning staff studied Cataloiu’s plan and determined there was nothing they could legally do to stop it.
“So we accepted the plan and began processing it,” he said.
Recently, the city’s planning department issued a building permit for the necessary renovations. “There is not a lot involved in what they need to do,” said Scott Charney, city planning manager. “They are just making some tenant improvements to an existing building.”
The club will have indoor parking on the lower level, with the entertainment venue upstairs. An outdoor parking lot already exists on the property. ” The architecture and the signage is very low key,” Farfsing said. “It will not have flashing neon lights or any other feature that would make it obtrusive to the immediate industrial area or the nearest residential areas.”
Farfsing stressed that recent history shows one city after another trying to prohibit such clubs, spending significant amounts of money in legal expenses and court costs and then losing the battle. “It’s one of those things that is not my cup of tea, but the Supreme Court said you can’t discriminate against this type of use,” he said. “The city council can try to stop it, but the city would lose in court.”
Charney said that the Palms will feature total nudity, and, for that reason, the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control will not issue the club a license to serve alcohol. “They are calling it a juice bar, but clearly that is not the way they are going to be making most of their money,” he said. “They will be charging admission and, the way I understand it, anyone who is at least 18 years old will be admitted.”
Cataloiu did not immediately return phone and email messages from the Signal Tribune.
