The City Council finds it necessary to provide for the regulation of businesses or commercial enterprises which operate as massage parlors, saunas, rap parlors, conversation parlors, adult sensitivity groups, adult encounter groups, escort services, dancing services, hostess services, and similar adult uses operating under different names in order to protect the public health, safety, and welfare, and to guard against the inception and transmission of disease. The City Council further finds that commercial enterprises such as the type described above, and all other similar establishments whose services include sessions offered to adults, conducted in private by members of the same or the opposite sex, and employing personnel with no specialized training, are susceptible to operating in a manner contravening, subverting, or endangering the morals of the community by being sites of acts of prostitution, illicit sex, and occurrences of violent crimes, thus requiring close inspection, licensing and regulation.
The City Council finds that control and regulation of commercial enterprises of these types, in view of the abuses often perpetrated, require intensive police and public health efforts by the City and local governmental units contracting with the City to provide such services. As a consequent, the concentrated use of such services in such control detracts from and reduces the level of services available to the rest of the community and thereby diminishes the ability of the City to promote the general health, welfare, morals, and safety of the community. The City Council finds that the regulations of this Ordinance will protect property values, eliminate or reduce blight, prevent deterioration of neighborhoods, prevent the exodus of residents and businesses from City neighborhoods, and prevent the increase of crime and juvenile delinquency.
[§ 7A-901 amended by Ord. No. 07-02, effective March 1, 2007.]