Florida [Palm Beach Post]- You might not think there’s a link between the elderly poor, the mentally ill and the guy patronizing a local strip club.

But that’s probably because you haven’t heard of Florida House Bill 751 or Cecilia Baci.

Baci, 77, is a resident of a nursing home in St. Petersburg who griped to her legislator about the paltry amount of money she receives from the state for monthly living expenses.

“Thirty-five dollars a month doesn’t go far,” Baci said Thursday. “We just want to go to the hairdresser, get out so you can enjoy yourself, have a little pleasure.”

It has been 20 years since Florida has raised its monthly personal needs allowance to low-income residents of nursing homes, intermediate-care facilities and state mental hospitals.

Baci found a receptive ear in State Rep. Rick Kriseman, D-St. Petersburg, who thinks he has found a way to double that monthly allowance to $70.

The solution: a $1 admission surcharge on adult entertainment businesses.

“Anybody who can afford to go to those places can afford to pay an extra dollar,” Baci said. “I think everybody should be concerned about taking care of the elderly.”

But that’s just it. Everybody isn’t paying. Just the people paying for admission to a strip club, or “private shower shows,” “body shampoos or scrubs,” “topless waitressing” and “erotic massages.”

Florida’s adult entertainment industry is in a lather over the proposed tax.

“I guess there’s no more money left in cigarettes,” said Jamie Benjamin, an advisory attorney for the Florida Sunshine Entertainment Association. “What about everybody stepping up to the plate in a general tax?”

With the state looking at a $2 billion budget deficit, Kriseman said he knew his bill would be doomed if paying for it meant a new drain on state revenue.

“My first thought was to pay for it by lifting the sales tax exemption on bottled water,” he said.

But that was politically untenable too, and certainly a less appealing target than the state’s adult entertainment industry.

“Adult entertainment is one of the largest industries still reaping a profit and propping up a troubled economy in the state facing one of its largest budget shortfalls in years,” the Florida Sunshine Entertainment Association crowed in a recent pronouncement of its vitality.

Florida wouldn’t be the first state to use a strip-club tax to forestall making a politically riskier and more equitable decision. This year, Texas started a $5 strip-club admissions surcharge – dubbed the “pole tax” – to pay for programs aimed to help victims of sexual assault.

Protected ‘message’ seen in strip clubs

The legislators there justified the tax by saying that both strip clubs and sexual assault objectify women. So far, nobody in Florida has found a creative way to connect strip-club patronage to mental hospitals and nursing homes.

“The only connection I could see is that maybe if we entertain them more, they’d be happier,” Benjamin said.

Kriseman said there really isn’t a link, but it doesn’t matter.

“We could have very easily said the money goes into general revenue, then see that it went for this,” he said. “But we were more upfront about it.”

Florida’s adult entertainment industry will fight the proposed tax, Benjamin said, on the constitutional grounds that adult entertainment is protected by the First Amendment and that taxing it in this way could be viewed as an infringement on free speech.

“I think there’s a message in adult entertainment, and it’s protected,” Benjamin said. “It’s a slippery slope.”

Especially the message in massages. Very slippery slopes there.

Tampa, Florida (WTSP-TV) —- Strip clubs are used to receiving $1 bills. Now they may be the ones handing them out. It’s all because Cecilia Baci spoke up. “I just figured that somebody had to speak up,” says Baci.

The 77-year-old firecracker has rolled with attitude for the last three years at the Lexington Rehab Center in Pinellas County. Last summer she started her own campaign to receive a better personal allowance for low-income nursing home residents in state-run facilities. “They give us $35 a month” says Baci referring to the current allowance that residents receive from Medicaid.

After months of inquiries she finally received word from State Representative Rick Kriseman of St. Petersburg who informed her that he is proposing House Bill 751, a bill that would create a special tax of $1 for admission into adult establishments across the state. “Putting a special tax on adult businesses, to give it to private individuals, that’s not constitutional,” says Joe Redner the owner of Mons Venus in Tampa.

The move would cost Redner nearly $165,000 a year and that is only Mon’s take. Baci hopes that Redner and others can understand her take, “I would hope they wouldn’t mind giving up a dollar, because we’re worth it.” Redner agrees, “That’s true. And I think that they’re worth more than that.”

Redner says paying them is not the issue. Regardless he still plans to fight it to the end.

The bill is scheduled to be introduced in March and it could be on the Governor’s desk by May.