Fort Walton Beach Council minutes — 04-26-1982 Special — reading text

275 MINUTES OF THE specIAL MEETING OF CITY COUNCIL FORT WALTON BEACH, FLORIDA April 26, 1982 - 5:00 p.m. INTRODUCTION A special meeting of the Fort Walton Beach City Council was held April 26, 1982, in the Civic Auditorium with the following members present: Mayor Kate Bagley Councilmembers: John Franklin Jerry Miller Pat Thornber John Bishop Al Grant James Baughman Also Present: City Clerk-Finance Director, Attorneys Chesser & Townsend Absent: Councilman Sundy, City Manager Mayor called the meeting to order noting it had been set by Council to hear discussion of Ordinance 740 concerning nudity/obscenity and read an amended meeting notice she had obtained after having so many calls from citizens asking if the ordinance could be read on first reading at the special meeting: “Purpose of amended notice is, on the advice of City Attorney, to make it clear that the matter of Ordinance 740 to be discussed at the special meeting, Monday, April 26, 1982, may also be voted upon at the special meeting, as Council may determine. This amended notice is given pursuant to a request of the Mayor." MR. BAUGHMAN Mayor asked for comments from members of Council before hearing from the audience. Mr. Baughman said he had talked to a number of citizens individually on a one-to-one basis some initially favored the ordinance and some initially who did not but he felt by the time his discussions were over the individuals understood what the ordinance said the majority favored. reasonable limitations. He said he had not heard people talking about putting the lounges or go-go places out of business, but he had heard some people who initially opposed the ordinance now favored some limitation - feeling there should be some limitation on human behavior in a civilized society. He felt the ordinance was not unreasonable; a matter of the community getting together to set outer limits on that type of behavior and he felt the lounge owners and dancers. should favor the outer limits, because competition would add to the activities now going on. He felt each one of the Council should think about before they voted that a vote against the ordinance at this point in time would send a very clear specific signal to the owners and dancers in establishments of this kind that the City, its citizens and the City Council condone or perhaps welcome the public display of genitals, unlimited touching or fondling between patrons and dancers or even goingso far as perhaps fornicate or simulate fornication on the stage. He felt this was not the signal the majority of the citizens of the town wanted to send to the people in the 276 MR. Baughman Mr. Grant Mrs. Thornber Mayor 4-26-82 vacation industry. He said that. was why he would have to vote in favor of the ordinance. Mr. Grant said, based on discussions he had with the attorneys that they could characterize the ordinance as .a conservative ordinance and. as far as how well it stood up in court. remained to be seen but he felt it was defensible - he noted he had just learned that morning that the Bay County ordinance in fact was copied from an early draft of the ordinance Fort Walton Beach was now working with... He confessed to being the perpetrator as far as developing the ordinance but when he approached it he did not consider it basically as a moral issue; he considered it a part of a much larger issue. He said as far as the ordinance itself was concerned he did not feel there was anyone on the Council that if they took out any part they wanted to could say yes they would condone that in Fort Walton Beach.He said he did not know if the activitiy described in the ordinance was going on in _ Fort Walton Beach he did not know; he described the. ordinance as establishing a level of decency he felt the majority of the people in Fort Walton Beach would support and he would not try to make any more out of the ordinance than that. He felt it was a part of an even bigger issue; an issue that they joined on that stage last July that as they interpreted what the voters had just done, they felt very strongly that they wanted to see a change in the quality of life in Fort Walton Beach and he felt this issue was just one more aspect of it. He noted in regard to litigation he would hate to think that any one of them lacked the “guts" through the fear of litigation that they would not be willing to do what their conscience or their hearts told them should be done; saying as far as cost to taxpayers of litigation based on discussions with the Attorney he felt they would probably find themselves in a posture that within a short period of time they would be receiving all the Attorney's support that they needed at a minimum cost - saying the Attorney had indicated that he would be willing to subtract any cost the City incurred from the bond issue fees that would be given him, so the idea of what this would cost the city or the taxpayers did not bother him very much. He felt very strongly that they had joined an issue that he sincerely hoped and prayed that they would not back away from. Mrs. Thornber said she did not have a great deal to say; she disagreed with Mr. Grant and Mr. Baughman and she thought they had an unreasonable ordinance and she was not in favor of it. Mayor said she had received many letters and read one from a tourist from Texas, Matt Tipton, Houston, Texas. He noted the leaning toward the "strip joints" concerned him and he was happy to see the ordinance come up. as a concerned tourist. He urged its passage. The Mayor noted since she did not vote reiterated they were not taking anyone's job; that was not the real feeling of the ordinance. She said she came to Fort Walton Beach 21 years ago, a widow with five children to raise and she did it without taking off her clothes; and she sent all those children through college. Mr .Miller 4-26~-82 277 Mr. Miller said he didn't perceive their job as being one of satisfying a particular of the citizens or one of satisfying themselves but one of balancing those considerations. He said at the last meeting he undertook to do his job based upon what he perceived their responsibility to be as legislators. He said he was sorry that that his perception and that of a substantial portion of the audience was different; he said he was disappointed by that. He said he undertook to do his job without explaining the motivation for his doing so and that was an error in retrospect and one which he would not commit that day. He said he had the advantage of evaluating for himself as valid or invalid as that evaluation might be, the case which had tried a similar ordinance to that before Council for consideration. He said he had the advantage of that information as he interpreted it and he under- took to meet the responsibility that he believed that case imposed upon them as legislators in that in particular it imposed on them the responsibility to support any claim of connection between the offences they would regulate, alcohol consumption and criminal activity and in order to have a valid action by Council those conclusions must be supported by sufficient justifi- cation to restrict or place a burden upon the usual constitutional rights. He said he had shared that standard and he hoped perhaps that cast a new light on the inquiries he made at the last meeting. He said that standard of law was important to them including the citizens if they were to have an action out of the Council that would be sufficient in the eyes of the law. He said to that point they were substantially insufficient in such standards and for the purposes of contributing to that he asked Mr. Grant if he would permit attachment as an exhibit to the minutes the letter which he wrote to each of Council and which recently appeared in the Playground News regarding the issue. Mr. Grant agreed. He noted that the Police Department had provided an offense report of comparative businesses in the community a copy of which he had for a short period of time, and he said he would provide that to the recorder for attachment to the minutes of the meeting as an exhibit. He said each person he had talked to about the issue initially believed it to be an easy one until he shared some thoughts and asked them to sit in his chair for a short period of time and determine not what their vote would be but, whether they still concluded this was an easy issue - the ordinance before them for consideration - at the end of each discussion each person agreed that it was not an easy issue and that was contrary to what someone might have felt had they sat at their meeting a week ago. He said it was not an easy issue; they had to that point been faced with the dilemma of facing considerations of extreme and often considerations of absurdity. He said on the one hand he did not subscribe to the philosophy that they could not regulate morality; he believed that was an absurdity - they did it each time they established a criminal act as being an offense that should carry criminal sanctions. He said on the other hand, he was compelled to recognize that there were some constitutional parameters within which they must perform and must regulate and they did not have the liberty to abuse those constitutional standards and he as a legislator would not exercise that to the extent of abuse. He said he didn't believe and they had one speaker so far who had asked them to do so, and they had speakers at the last regular meeting asking them to do so; saying he did not believe they could legislate based upon | 278 | Mr. Miller ——— 4-26-82 misrepresentations, guesses, speculation, or innuendo. He said it was his opinion that they must have some basis of fact upon which to act in their capacity as Councilmen. He said. they were asked to exercise a police power to regulate a particular industry; those dealing with the distribution and consumption on the premises of alcoholic beverages. He said many of those in the audience he knew believed and felt and desired that the City have an obscenity ordinance in the community; he said the ordinance before them did not do that. He felt that was a misconception that should be reevaluated and each person should recognize as they are able to conclude by reading the ordinance what it relates to; the question of what impact it had he would comment on later. He said he had some particular areas of concern about the ordinance in its present form. He said those concerns provided him with a Christian challenge that he might not be adequate to face; he did not know. He said he had given it his best effort to do so. He had examined it he hoped on each of the areas of consideration and tried to give them some balance so that he could determine the extent of which he was willing to have the Council exercise the police power they possessed. He said his personal standards and those for his family were substantially more restrictive than the ordinance parameters - the activities it purported to prohibit or to control - he agreed with a statement just made by one of the Council, that was not a person that he was aware of on the Council that had personal standards that caused them to condone or actively participate in the attempted prohibited activities in the ordinance. He said they must weigh that personal standard against the public standard in the community, and in that regard they had some historical fact that they must consider that they could not ignore one of which in particular was that topless dancing had been permitted in the community for 15 years possibly and on occasion when there had been attempted prosecutions, at least on one occasion, a jury of peers of the person charged was found not guilty of a criminal act for performing a topless act. He said they must weigh those considerations and try to consider how they might balance them. He said he had concepts of what constitute: Biblical sin, his church