It took a strongly worded suggestion from a U.S. District Court judge to convince the city of Suffolk that they had to issue a permit for Intimate Desires, the community’s first adult retailer, but the city listened to their counsel and begrudgingly allowed the store to open last week, ending a year-long battle.
“The good guys finally win one – and by good guys I mean us,” Gregory Sakas, owner of Intimate Desires, said. “ They were hoping I would just give up and find another place to go, but I don’t give up; I’m very tenacious.”
Suffolk had no existing regulations concerning adult orientated businesses in their Unified Development Ordinance, the city's realty oversight tool, when Sakas decided to open a store there. The city originally attempted to argue that because adult retail stores were not specifically approved of in their UDO, the store could not open.
The city then decided to create some regulations regarding adult businesses, and denied a permit for Intimate Desires on that basis that the 1,000-square-foot storefront in a strip mall that Sakas had leased for the store wasn’t zoned properly.
Further research showed that there wasn’t a single building in the city that was zoned properly for an adult store.
“They were saying that there were plenty of places to go, but they weren’t willing to tell us where they were. That’s because there weren’t any,” Sakas said.
So Sakas sued. He retained Barry Covert of the law firm Lipsitz, Green, Fahringer, Roll, Salisburg, and Cambria to make his case, and while the city put up an obstinate fight, and a Circuit Court sided with the city, in May a federal judge suggested that the city settle. “Of course the city tried to make it sound like a compromise. The compromise was do it or else.”
If the case had gone to federal court, Sakas would have been able to sue the city for a sizeable sum. “We won’t though. We beat them and we’re moving on. My lawyer said, ‘Go ahead and make some money.’ And I guess that’s what I’ll do; it’s difficult to produce a decent profit margin with all of these lawsuits,” Sakas said.
“And we’re here now, part of the community. We’d prefer to be a good neighbor.”
Sakas owns six other adult stores, most of which are located in North Carolina.
