Rochester, Minnesota- from www.postbulletin.com- Just as was done with public smoking a decade ago, an initiative is getting under way to battle publicly available pornography.

Olmsted County commissioners last week heard a presentation from a victim services advocate who described the start of a program asking Rochester hotels to voluntarily curtail their offerings of pay-per-view porn movies.

Commissioners will be asked later this year to vote on a policy prioritizing “clean” hotels as the first choice for public officials and employees who travel.

“It’s changing an environment that normalizes sexual harm,” said Jeanne Martin, a program manager in Dodge-Fillmore-Olmsted Community Corrections.

Martin said she is involved with a group that includes representatives from the county’s Public Health Department and Mayo Clinic who believe pornography is tied to sexual violence, and that restricting access to porn is a means of preventing that form of violence.

One member of the group met recently with Bruce Fairchild, regional director of operations for Sunstone Hotel Investors, which owns four Rochester hotels including the Kahler Grand and Marriott, and asked him to make the properties “clean.”

“Unfortunately I can’t today, because we’re contractually obligated” to the company that offers the service, Fairchild told the Post-Bulletin. “When that contract is up, we probably will take it out.”

Fairchild said he believed the remaining term of the contract with the service provider, LodgeNet Interactive Corporation, is about one year. “If we could do it without breaking a contract, we would have done it right away,” he said.

Another Rochester hotel, Country Inn and Suites, already does not offer pornographic movies in its rooms. “It’s a family hotel,” said Michelle Steffl, the hotel’s general manager. The no-porn policy belongs to the hotel’s corporate owners, she said.

The recommended travel policy for county officials will have staff support when commissioners are asked to vote on it this fall, said County Administrator Richard Devlin. He described the current state of the initiative as “very, very similar” to the beginnings of the county’s workplace smoking ban, which had its roots in the late 1990s as a voluntary initiative by Rochester-area restaurants.

People argued at first that their rights were being infringed upon, but as time passed and people got used to smoke-free workplaces, the public health point of view took hold and the “rights” argument withered away, Devlin said.