Rhode Island- Spurred by recent controversy in Richmond, the Charlestown Town Council enlisted the town solicitor to research the possibility of implementing an adult entertainment ordinance, this Monday night.

Solicitor Peter Ruggiero said that while the town cannot prohibit an adult entertainment store from setting up business in town due to constitutional laws, it can regulate where and how the store can conduct its business.

“You have latitude,” Ruggiero said. “It’s a matter of just drafting an ordinance and making sure it doesn’t bump into constitutional restrictions.”

In Richmond, speculation that a Cranston business group plans to open an adult store in the former Bickford’s lot on Main Street in Wyoming has engendered some dispute concerning the town’s ability to thwart such a move. According to Richmond zoning official Gary Tedeschi, however, the town has no lawful ability to prevent such a store from opening.

That ongoing issue prompted Monday’s motion, which was preceded by some indignation on the town council’s part that such businesses had any constitutional rights at all.

“You mean to tell me we can’t prevent something like that from coming into town?” asked Councilor Forrester Safford. “We can keep an automotive shop out, but not an adult peep-show?”

Obscenity cases have traditionally been heated issues in constitutional law, dating back to the Hicklin test in 1868, which sought to classify the qualities that made something obscene. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of ‘Miller vs. California’ that obscenity, defined as something that showed “patently offensive sexual content” that fell outside of artistic, literary, political or scientific value, was not protected by the First Amendment and, consequently, could be determined on a local level. Subsequent cases have typically enabled towns or municipalities to prohibit certain materials or performances deemed “obscene,” and, Ruggiero noted, empowered a town like Charlestown to control the zoning and content of such businesses.

In the 1981 decision of ‘Schad vs. Borough of Mount Ephraim, however, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of an adult dancing establishment, which a New Jersey town sought to ban completely. The Supreme Court reasoned that business was the purveyor of a form of expression protected under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

The end result of these cases is that town solicitors such as Ruggiero must explore the legal gray area of adult entertainment before drafting an ordinance limiting it. Zoning laws typically allow towns some freedom in zoning for such businesses, and often “community needs” will play a role in determining a location. Typically, a town has two options in locating an adult business: employ a concentrated approach, in which adult businesses are limited to a single, shared zone, or a dispersed approach, in which the opposite effect occurs. In either case, the town will pursue the goal of what Councilor Gregory Avedisian referred to as keeping the business “as far away as possible from everyone else.”

The key in such cases, Ruggiero said, is developing an ordinance before the business arrives in town. “If you have nothing in place,” he said, “you’ll be reacting.”

In light of that estimation, Ruggiero will spend the next few weeks reviewing the town’s options and, eventually, write up a preliminary advice on what the town council can do. As Ruggiero often mentioned, the town is certainly not limited in how it can regulate adult business; it simply cannot exclude it altogether.

In Hopkinton, for instance, the town council passed an ordinance in October that forces adult businesses to receive a permit from the town and restricts them to industrial building zones.

“You have a lot of flexibility in what you can do,” Ruggiero said. “It’s mostly a philosophical approach.”