Overturning the strip-club moratorium was an “unfortunate” decision. Getting rid of the four-foot rule made things “worse.” And the very fact that strip clubs may now open, unfettered, throughout Seattle leaves “our neighborhoods… unprotected.”
Hysterical rhetoric from retrograde NIMBY activists? Nope. Those words were penned by mayoral spokeswoman Marianne Bichsel, part of a push by Mayor Nickels’s office to resurrect his strip-club ghetto in Georgetown. The council rejected that proposed red-light district in September, arguing (rightly) that (a) South Seattle takes more than its share of things the North End doesn’t want (the trash transfer station, sex-offender housing), and (b) there’s no evidence that concentrating strip clubs has any positive effect. Instead, a majority of the council supported dispersing clubs throughout the city, with buffers separating them from places frequented by kids and from other strip clubs.
Bichsel’s letter, sent to neighborhood groups a few days before the council took up the question of how to regulate strip clubs in post-four-foot-rule Seattle, contained a thinly veiled threat: “Neighbors … must get engaged” by pushing the council to adopt Nickels’s proposal, or they might end up with “strip clubs … in inappropriate areas of the city.”
On Monday, November 20, some council members, including Tom Rasmussen, appeared poised to reconsider the mayor’s proposal, at least as an interim measure. In response, Jan Drago noted that two thirds of voters rejected the council’s strip-club rules, sending a “clear message” that “they don’t consider adult entertainment a big problem.” Later, Peter Steinbrueck said he would “absolutely refuse to allow [the proposal] to come back under any circumstances.” Meanwhile, an application has reportedly been filed for a new strip club at 95th and Aurora.
Nightlife businesses, another group that has come into conflict with Mayor “24-hour city” Nickels’s legislative agenda, had a schmooze-fest last week that drew more than half the council, several lobbyists, and at least one state legislator (but no mayoral staffers) to Amber in Belltown, where a packed room snacked on sandwiches and crudités and debated their legislative priorities. On the agenda: extending the December 2007 deadline for compliance with new sprinkler requirements, eliminating the 25-foot rule in the smoking ban, and (a priority for some but not others) liberalizing state liquor laws to allow later closing hours and bottle service.
A lawyer for one nightlife establishment that has been targeted by the city—the Celtic Swell in West Seattle—recently sent an irate, rambling 11-page letter to the city’s Department of Planning and Development, insisting that DPD rescind its demand that the Swell obtain a special “drinking-establishment” permit to operate at night, or face litigation by its owners [“Pizza and Fear,” Erica C. Barnett, July 27]. The letter, which at one point refers to a DPD complainant as a “fruitcake,” accuses the city of making “legally groundless complaints” and “fabricat[ing] standards” for drinking establishments and demands that DPD sign off on a sidewalk permit for the restaurant and withdraw its notice of violation. 