Desrin, Florida- Destin can’t stop a strip club opening on Mountain Drive without the power of prayer, a local pastor says.

“This is spiritual warfare,” Destin United Methodist Pastor Ken Taylor said at a Tuesday meeting with City Manager Greg Kisela and Mayor Craig Barker. “You can’t fight spiritual warfare battles with the law of the land.”

The battle is against Atlanta strip-club owner Terry Stephenson’s plan to introduce nude dancing to the Oasis in Destin, a Mountain Drive pool hall. Stephenson, who’s leasing the property from landowner Rocky Griffiths, applied for a business license in November, and filed suit in federal court after the application was rejected.

As of Tuesday, the city hadn’t been served in the case, but Kisela and Barker invited Taylor and about a dozen other local pastors to meet with them at City Hall for an update on the city’s plans. Kisela said he’d heard concerns in the community that the city would knuckle under, but that wasn’t so.

“Be assured we’re going to aggressively defend this lawsuit,” Kisela said.

“I appreciate you’re doing this on something other than the cheap,” said the Rev. Mike Hesse of Immanuel Anglican Church.

“We’ll spend a hundred thousand before it’s done,” Kisela replied.
Destin turned down the application because sexually oriented businesses are allowed only in industrial zoning, which consists of two areas off Airport Road.

“You have to pick your poison,” Kisela said. “You can’t deny them coming into your community; you have to decide where you want them.”

Stephenson has said the zoning and other restrictions on adult entertainment are “a not-so-thinly veiled effort to eliminate nude dancing in the city,” which the lawsuit says violates the First Amendment because it “eliminates accessibility to erotic speech and expression” in Destin.

The suit says the city has offered no evidence that nude dancing would harm the community so there’s no “compelling government interest” in censoring it. City Land Use Attorney Scott Shirley told The Log this week that the city has files of evidence available at City Hall that will prove otherwise.

Kisela told the pastors the city has hired an attorney who’s an expert in regulating sexually oriented businesses to make sure the city’s ordinances will be defensible in court. For example, the attorney recommended the city delete the requirement that businesses be at least 500 feet from residential areas because that would leave Stephenson with only five or six sites in the industrial district and none of them is available.

“If we leave it as it is right now, courts will say, ‘It’s too restrictive — you need to let him go on Mountain Drive,’ ” Kisela said.
Kisela said staff have drafted an adult-entertainment ordinance that will go before the city’s Local Planning Agency for review next week.

The ordinance includes several requirements:

•Background checks to see if owners or their staff have criminal records: “If they’ve been arrested for prostitution in the last five years, they will not be permitted.”
•Dancers must be up on a stage, with six feet of separation between them and the audience.
•No alcohol can be sold or used on the premises.

Kisela said these rules would be more defensible than the city’s 1986 ordinance, which banned nude or topless dancing outright. He said that Fort Lauderdale, where he worked as deputy city manager before coming to Destin, had used regulation and restriction to whittle down a dozen strip clubs to just two, and since his departure, one of those had closed.

Kisela said he and his staff were also working with Okaloosa County to make sure that Stephenson wouldn’t be able to duck all the regulations by opening up just outside city limits.

Meanwhile, strip-club manager Stephenson says that turning the Oasis on Mountain Drive into a nude-dancing club would add “an extra dimension of attraction” in Destin’s harbor district,

“You have golfers, you have fishermen. This is another reason to come to Destin,” Stephenson, the owner of Trident Operations LLC, told The Log. “I intend on being a good neighbor to my city.”

As Stephenson spoke to The Log, a link to the building that would be Destin’s first topless bar and the Destin Docks was emerging.
Stephenson owns the One of a Kind charter boat, and its captain, Casey Godwin, is the registered agent for Trident. Griffiths, the landowner leasing the Oasis to Stephenson, also owns a boat, but Stephenson said nobody should think this says anything about the fishing fleet’s future.

“The Oasis has nothing to do with the fishing business,” Stephenson said. “My boat is a hobby that I turned into a business to support my hobby — my main goal with my boat is to make sure that Casey and Matt stay as busy and happy and well-fed as possible.”
Stephenson added that Godwin’s only involvement in Trident was handling registered mail when that was necessary.

Stephenson said that although he’s gone to court over Destin’s refusal to grant him a business license, “I’m not trying to shove it down anyone’s throat.”

He said he and his attorneys had met and negotiated with the city, but since his application had been refused, “I can’t afford to sit on my hands indefinitely.”

Stephenson said he was confident things would go smoother “once some folks get used to me and see the positive things. I’m all about doing charity work, I’ve auctioned off Harleys … . I have a bigger outreach than most folks.”