Group Accused of Unfair Tactics in Ordinance Dispute

The plot has thickened in the feud between the Arizona City Council and exotic dance clubs Babe’s and Skin Cabaret. In response to the purchase of Babe’s by adult performer Jenna Jameson with her partners last year, the City Council passed an ordinance amendment in December, 2005, banning nudity and requiring a four-foot barrier between exotic dancers and patrons in the only two exotic dance clubs in town. In response to that action, Jameson launched a referendum drive and succeeded in placing the issue before the voters on a May 16 ballot.

The East Valley Tribune reported that in a recent development, Lamar Whitmer, a political consultant hired to lobby for Babe’s and Skin Cabaret as the clubs try to overturn the regulations, has filed papers forming a political action committee - on behalf of a group with ties to the clubs - aimed at defeating a proposition that would raise the city’s spending limit by $79 million.

The story said that the connection between the clubs and the spending cap opposition has prompted accusations that the political committee’s true intent is to pressure the City Council on the exotic dance ordinance.

“Why else would the strip clubs be involved or at all interested?” asked Mayor Mary Manross. “It simply is an attempt to threaten the council so that we will give them what (they) want and gut our ordinance, which protects our commercial and residential neighborhoods,” Manross told Ryan Gabrielson of the East Valley Tribune.

Whitmer denied that there was a link between the two. The spending cap opposition group is simply trying to force greater City Hall financial accountability, he said.

Portions of this courtesy of the Free Speech X-Press, the weekly newsletter of the Free Speech Coalition. More info at www.freespeechcoalition.com.