YELLOWSTONE COUNTY, MT – County commissioners in Yellowstone County, Montana voted unanimously to place two new ordinances on the primary election ballot. The ordinances, which would introduce tighter regulations on adult shops, strip clubs, and other sexually-oriented businesses, will be put to Yellowstone County voters on June 6th.According to reports in the Billings Gazette, county commissioners acted after listening to testimony from a dozen speakers and the commission’s actions come on the heels of four years of public hearings and meetings, one lawsuit, and a recent opinion issued by a district judge.
Commissioner Jim Reno said he shared opponents’ “sense of outrage” when Planet Lockwood, a bar and casino, opened a strip club in December of 2001.
“We’ve been at it since 2001,’’ added Commissioner Bill Kennedy. “Yellowstone County gave this a thorough review every step of the way. Now we’re giving people an opportunity to have the final say. We’re giving people in this community an opportunity to have their voices heard.’’
A group called Citizens Against Sexual Exploitation presented both ordinances to commissioners in 2003, according to the Gazette. At the time, commissioners said they weren’t sure they had the authority to enact the proposed ordinances, so they filed civil “friendly lawsuit” which named Dallas Erickson of Stevensville, MT as the defendant.
Erickson is the head of an organization called “Help Our Moral Environment,” an anti-porn group that has worked to limit the spread of sexually oriented businesses throughout the state and to impose stronger regulations on existing adult businesses.
In his decision, District Judge Russell Fagg ruled both ordinances are constitutional and could be put to vote on the ballot. The commissioners appealed the case to the Montana Supreme Court, but the court refused hear the appeal.
According to the Gazette, the ordinance restricting sexually-oriented businesses would apply to the zoning jurisdiction area outside the Billings city limits only. The City Council has delayed action on changing regulations within Billings.
Should the ordinance pass, any new adult business within the county’s zoning jurisdiction would have to comply with a long list of new restrictions, including one prohibiting doors on video viewing booths, which means customers would always be within sight of the store manager. Chief Deputy County Attorney Dan Schwarz said existing sexually oriented businesses within the affected area would be grandfathered under the previous zoning code.
The language of the proposed obscenity ordinance utilizes the same language as the Supreme Court standard, namely that materials are considered obscene if the “average person, applying contemporary adult standards, taken as a whole, would find that the material appeals to the prurient interest in sex” and that a reasonable person would conclude that the work “lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”
According to reports in the Gazette, there was at least one voice of dissent at Wednesday’s hearing.
Terry Zee Lee, a local businesswoman, urged the commission to decline both ordinances, saying that the people who drafted them have relied on “sensationalism and unsubstantiated national statistics that have no relevance to the realities of any present situations in Yellowstone County.”
“I realize that some people become addicted to erotic material,” said Lee, “but the problems they create are few when compared to the problems that illegal drug use, alcohol, smoking, gambling, unemployment, lack of education, and bigotry like this hearing causes.”
