Topless Question Hurts Bottom Line Restaurateur Says He Was Only Curious About Nude Dancing Laws

Pend Oreille Restaurant & Lounge owner Ray Jensen says he was just curious when he asked the Newport city attorney about local rules for nude dancing.

Big mistake.

Officials next door at City Hall haven’t finished their answer, and Jensen has already lost one-fourth of his restaurant income.

“No more questions,” Jensen said. “We eke out a living here. This is really hurting us. You take 25 percent of not too much, and you’re hurting.”

He said his Sunday after-church lunch trade was cut in half when the Newport Miner reported the council’s rush to pass a “dirty dancing law” as the result of his casual inquiry.

It all started Dec. 29 when Jensen’s liquor license was suspended for 48 days for four counts of allowing drunks to keep drinking. Jensen said sympathetic customers started suggesting other ways to make money during the suspension. Someone thought of strippers.

Jensen admitted the idea appealed to him briefly, “but I put it out of my mind.”

He remembered that a restaurant in neighboring Oldtown, Idaho, brought in the Chippendale male strippers a half-dozen years ago and never recovered. The ostracized restaurant folded.

Still, Jensen said he wondered what Newport ordinances said about strippers. So he called City Attorney Mark Hanley.

“I’ll bet it wasn’t a 30- or 40-second phone conversation,” Jensen said. “I forgot about it until I read the paper.”

Hanley didn’t forget, though. He got the City Council to pass an emergency ordinance during an early morning meeting Dec. 29. The council also imposed a three-month moratorium on permits for the city’s newly regulated and still non-existent “adult cabaret” industry.

The Planning Commission has been directed to find a suitable place for cabarets and recommend appropriate changes in the zoning code.

“I’m going to recommend the industrial zone over here,” said City Administrator Jack Henderson, nodding toward the part of town on the other side of the railroad tracks from the business district.

Even if Jensen doesn’t plan to hire strippers, the City Council wants to be prepared in case someone else gets the idea, Henderson said. The city can’t outlaw nude dancing, but it can set rules.

“This is an issue we have public support on,” Henderson said. “You don’t want to hear what people said to me on the phone, especially women.”

Jensen said he also supports the new law: “It’s a nice little town. They shouldn’t have anything like that going on.”

Still, his attorney, Dennis Scott, thinks the 19-page ordinance is “pretty ridiculous.” Scott said he thinks Jensen’s “tongue-in-cheek” inquiry “was motivated primarily out of pique at the liquor control people. If they were going to shut down his bar, he’d find some other way to make a living.”

Actually, the Washington Liquor Control Board allows strippers if state and local rules are followed.

Newport’s new rules, which are stricter than the state’s, require nude performers to stay on a 3-foot-high stage with a fence to keep spectators eight feet away. If performers want to mingle with the crowd, they have to put their clothes on and refrain from the kind of touching that might earn a tip.

The ordinance offers a short course in anatomy so people will know what constitutes nudity for each gender.

To ensure compliance, the law guarantees visiting privileges for city inspectors and requires strippers to meet quarterly with the police chief.

Performers and managers must pay $100 a year for a license, and adult cabaret owners must pay $700 a year. Henderson said it was an oversight that the ordinance, borrowed from another city, also slapped a $400-a-year fee on any establishment that offers a live band.

“I’m going to have to take a closer look at it, and we may have to amend that part,” Henderson said. “Our focus was somewhere else.”

, DataTimes