OCEAN CITY, MD — The City Council of Ocean City, MD this week unanimously approved a moratorium on the establishment of sexually explicit businesses in the town, pending the creation of local ordinances to regulate such businesses.According to The Maryland Coast Dispatch, the measure approved by the Council was originally presented Monday night by City Solicitor Guy Ayres. “Resolution 2007-5” specifies what manners of business are to be considered “sexually oriented” businesses and lays out the city’s rationale for restricting and regulating them.
Invoking the usual set of “negative secondary effects” purportedly caused by adult businesses, the opening text of the resolution states that “sexually oriented businesses require special supervision from the public safety agencies of the county and the town in order to protect and preserve the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the patrons of such businesses as well as the citizens of the City.”
As is typical for such municipal ordinances, the Ocean City resolution asserts that adult businesses foster an environment that encourages prostitution and other crimes, leading to reduced property values and “urban blight.”
Although it cites no studies or research directly, the resolution states that there is “convincing documented evidence that sexually oriented businesses, because of their very nature, have a deleterious effect on both the existing businesses around them and the surrounding residential areas adjacent to them, causing increased crime and the downgrading of property values.”
Under the resolution, types of businesses subject to the city’s moratorium include adult bookstores, adult cabarets, adult theaters, adult arcades, adult video stores, adult motels, and adult novelty stores.
The resolution justifies the moratorium by stating that the Mayor and City Council “has determined that it needs time to study the totality of the deleterious effect of sexually oriented business from a zoning and locational criteria and [time to craft] a comprehensive regulatory legislation scheme to protect the citizens of the town and to prevent a proliferation of sexually oriented businesses while the Planning Commission and the mayor and City Council of Ocean City properly study and analyze zoning and regulation issues.”
Finally, the Council asserts in the resolution that the “public health, safety and general welfare is best served by imposing a moratorium on the issuance of business licenses for sexually oriented businesses.”
Ocean City’s rush to pass an adult business ordinance began about a month ago, according to the Coast Dispatch, when the adult retail store SexStyle opened up at the Bayside Shopping Plaza.
Three days later, concerned citizens lodged their complaints at a meeting of the mayor and City Council, urging the city’s officials to establish regulations that would discourage other adult businesses from opening in the area.
After a week of looking into ways to prevent adult businesses from opening in the area at all, Ocean City officials realized that so long as adult businesses follow the law, there is little a city can do to prevent them from opening shop.
Despite this realization, a motion proposed by Councilman Jim Hall at a meeting of the mayor and City Council last week to consider a moratorium on adult businesses was approved, unanimously.
At the same meeting, City Solicitor Ayres noted that adult businesses are protected under the U.S. Constitution and that if the city prohibited adult stores from opening in some areas of town, it would have to permit them to open elsewhere in town.
Ayres also cautioned that the city must carefully tailor its ordinance to avoid running afoul of the law.
“When you are dealing with First Amendment rights, the court looks… for vagueness,” Ayres said, according to reports in the Associated Press.
The owners of SexStyle, Ofir Bouzaglo and Moshe Bitton, own a similar store in Salisbury, MD, and have emphasized that they will ask for identification to verify the age of their patrons and work with Ocean City police to ensure their business does not become the sort of problem the City Council is worried about.
According to AP reports, Ocean City Planner Jesse Houston said a public hearing to discuss potential adult business regulations will be conducted at a May 1st Planning and Zoning meeting.
