Seattle’s lap dance ban fails, but debate goes on

SEATTLE – Like many residents of this famously liberal city, Iris Nicholas was baffled when the City Council passed strict regulations on strip clubs, including a lap dance ban, last year.

Where did this prudish streak come from, she wondered.

No bother. The city’s voters rejected the new rules by a 2-to-1 margin last week, rendering the city safe for lap dances once again. It was especially good news for Nicholas, who makes her living in black fishnets, 7-inch stilettos and not much else.

The vote closes one chapter in Seattle’s contentious relationship with the strip club industry – a two-decade effort to prevent or, more recently, gently dissuade new cabarets from opening within city limits. With potential owners no longer fearing the “4-foot rule,” Mayor Greg Nickels is resigned to new clubs opening. He’s calling on the City Council to hurry up and do the politically sensitive work of determining where to allow them.

“There is money to be made in strip clubs, and unfortunately right now we’re in a position where they could go in any neighborhood business district in the city,” Nickels warned at a news conference last week.

He favors creating a red-light district in industrial south Seattle, a plan he sent in January to Peter Steinbrueck, chairman of the City Council’s development and planning committee. Nickels isn’t pleased that Steinbrueck has taken so long to come up with a plan of his own.

Steinbrueck prefers to allow the clubs in commercially zoned areas throughout the city, with buffers for places such as schools. He says he doesn’t want to rush out a bad zoning plan.

In the meantime, the city has already received a strip-club application from former comedy- and music-club owner Bob Davis, who’s been trying to open a cabaret here since the early ‘90s. He wants to put a club on a stretch of Aurora Avenue North that already features fast-food joints, pawnshops and adult bookstores.

No strip clubs have opened in Seattle since the late 1980s.