Gammoh

This “adult cabaret” zoning case in state court begins with another such case involving the same city that was decided in federal court. In Dease v. City of Anaheim (C.D.Cal. 1993) 826 F.Supp. 336 , the local federal district court struck down Anaheim’s conditional use permit zoning ordinance for “adult entertainment.” The sin of Anaheim’s ordinance, according to the Dease decision, was that it was not a true zoning ordinance, but a prior restraint on free speech because it invested the Anaheim Planning Commission with excessive substantive discretion as to whether a proposed permit would be granted. The court said: “The Anaheim permit scheme qualifies as a prior restraint, because it essentially requires the permittee to obtain the government’s permission or approval before engaging in an act of speech.” (Id. at p. 342.)

In the wake of Dease , Anaheim redrafted its adult entertainment zoning ordinance to eliminate its discretionary features. The new ordinance actually required a permit to be granted if the adult cabaret operator could satisfy certain objective criteria, the most important of which, for this case, was that the cabaret could not be within 400 feet of any…