A plan by Mayor Greg Nickels to create a strip club district was soundly rejected by the city’s Planning Commission last week.
In a draft report, the commission said strip clubs should be treated like performing arts centers, but with additional regulations to regulate their impact on surrounding neighborhoods, the Seattle Post Intelligencer reported.
Although the report is not binding on the city, it could mean the City Council would have to develop some other proposal to regulate strip clubs in the city.
Seattle has banned new clubs from the city for the past 17 years, saying that it needed to study the matter in order to develop a comprehensive policy to deal with new clubs in the city.
But last year, a federal court ruled that the city’s moratorium on new strip clubs was illegal, forcing the city try to develop regulations to deal with strip clubs and other adult entertainment businesses.
Nickels, however, developed a plan that would create a so-called cabaret district that would concentrate all new strip clubs into a geographical area in the city that would be far away from much of the rest of the city in order to reduce their impact on neighborhoods.
But the commission wrote in its report that such a concentration of strip clubs in close proximity to each other would resolve some issues, but would create other problems.
The commission said the city should spread out strip clubs throughout the city and create buffer areas that would reduce the clubs’ possible impact on neighborhoods.
