Last year, a proposed adult club was denied a zoning variance in a former restaurant in the Town of Collierville; this year, the club's owners have returned to sue the town and six city workers for civil rights violations.
Co-owner William Best said the proposed Cowgirls Cabaret would have featured female dancers in pasties and G-strings, but the zoning board ruled the club did not conform as conditional use in the commercial district where he planned to open it. And his planned suit will question whether the town changed the law prejudicially to bid to block the club.
Best and two partners first filed a zoning variance application in December 1998. Collierville took the allowable sixty days before hearing the case to write an ordinance addressing sex-oriented businesses, which city aldermen then approved. The law lets adult businesses into industrial zones if they are a thousand feet from "a long list of sensitive uses."
"We always wanted to go by the law," said one of the partners, unnamed, to the Memphis Commercial-Appeal. "But they kept putting us off and putting us off, until they changed the law."
