Mike Ross filed an afternoon report from Tampa between breaks in the city council meeting that will determine the future of lap dancing in Tampa. Ross said though the press tried to blow some aspects of the meeting out of proportion by predicting crowds of 35,000, his estimate is more in the neighborhood of 3500. The meeting began at 1 pm EST. Ross says Attorney Luke Lirot went to court in an attempt to get the decision shelved pending further study.
Ross: "The city began with about an hour's worth of presentations - labeling everything from the women who do this as being prostitutes with STDs to guys like you and me who watch this kind of thing as being child molesters. It was a whole gamut of stuff. There's been some legal wranglings. A couple of judge's opinions have been thrown in. [Attorney] Luke Lirot was in court while this was going on. He won a case, then he had a judge overturn him; he had a temporary restraining order, then another judge for the city turned around and canceled the temporary restraining order which added some dynamics to it. The mayor who ordinarily doesn't say anything, stood up and supported this thing. It's been a crazy thing. We had some church leaders stand up and say Jesus loves you; Jesus doesn't want this kind of thing happening. And we've had people stand up against them with the pastors saying, you can't belong to MY church.
"One of the things that's happening right now is that all the club owners are scared to death because they think they're going to start enforcing this thing tonight. I told most of the club owners that I don't think this is possible. In the meantime, we're trying to put together a referendum to overturn this thing, but the city has no process for it. The process that is outlined is only a paragraph long. We figured out that we had over 15,000 signatures turned in. We only need 13,000 to get some kind of referendum. We're going to court tomorrow to make the city come up with a process. It's going to ber based on the concept of prompt judicial review.
"About a year and a half ago in the Baby Tam case the judges said in First Amendment issues you have to have a prompt judicial review process. Lap dancing is not a constitutional issue, BUT doing a referendum is. The city has no process established for that. We're going to court in the morning to try and figure this out, to get the judge to make a ruling whether these petitions are good, whether the city has to disclose what the referendum process is, wheter the city has to turn around and create a referendum process. It doesn't necessarily deal specifically with the issue of lap dancing but it's a residual issue.
"Florida [the state] law is supporting what we say. Tampa is not. That's kind of the whole thing that's going on around here. The people are claiming that in Florida we have enough laws against obscenity and prostitution. Here, in Tampa, the police keep saying no. The thing that's interesting is, in a two year period, the city claims they had 59 arrests for prostitution, lewdness and obscenity; 12 of them were from clubs, the rest were from streetwalkers, prostitutes and massage parlors.
"The evidence the city introduced was like 13 inches-thick in a binder, but they didn't turn any of it over to us. We didn't get to see anything until they made their case. Some of the things that they say are really stupid like you can get STDs by lap dancing. If you're two naked people, yeah. The bottom line is the city has not paid attention to what's going on in the PAPS A&M case.
Ross said he and attorney Lou Sirkin were scheduled to give a presentation around 6 pm. "This has been driven by the media," Ross said. "The first hearing we had last week, there were two people in support of the ordinance. The mayor went out and made the churches get people here, even though the polls don't support it. There was a poll Wednesday on the most conservative TV station in the city coming out 54% in favor of lap dancing. That's where we're standing right now."
