Florida- When Sunny Isles Beach commissioners approved a new rule requiring Thee Dollhouse strip club to relocate, they did so knowing that the city likely will face a legal battle.

Even before commissioners voted to create a special zone for adult entertainment at a meeting this month, lawyers for Thee Dollhouse strip club were threatening a lawsuit.

”If the city passes this . . . we are going to be in litigation,” attorney Daniel Aaronson warned during a November commission meeting. “Even if you win, you will be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.”

But the prospect of a court fight didn’t sway commissioners.

They voted Dec. 18 to finalize the law creating a new adult entertainment zone, consisting of two shopping plazas along Collins Avenue, between 168th and 172nd streets. The new law gives Thee Dollhouse — the city’s only adult establishment — five years to move from its current location on the 163rd Street Causeway.

Opposing the move: an odd consortium of young men and women decked out in T-shirts reading ”Don’t Move Thee Dollhouse” and animated residents — some of them seniors — who say the club’s future spot is inappropriate.

Many learned about the hearing from a mailer that circulated, saying, “Your mayor and commissioners want to put Thee Dollhouse next to Starbucks or Epicure. Do you?”

‘I would be willing to bet 90 percent of the people in this room couldn’t tell you where exactly the `T’ house is. It’s very unobtrusive,” said resident John Resnick, whose comments were greeted with applause.

But commissioners say the city needs to upgrade its main entrance on 163rd Street — and Thee Dollhouse doesn’t fit.

”It has become quite apparent that we had to find a way to move the adult entertainment that was there to another part of our city,” said Mayor Norman Edelcup. “And to continue to move forward in the metamorphosis of the city from resort community to luxury, high-rise city.”

Edelcup voted along with commissioners Lewis Thaler, Gerry Goodman and George ”Bud” Scholl to create the new zone. Commissioner Roslyn Brezin was absent.

City attorney Hans Ottinot said the city has fulfilled its legal obligation — providing another place for the club to move. He said the law allows municipalities to regulate where and how such businesses operate in order to protect the public from ”secondary effects” such as increased crime and lower property values.

And city planning consultant Jack Luft gave an overview of the city’s long-range plans for a new gateway that would include a park or town center — on land that includes the current Dollhouse property.

Attorneys for the club seized on the plans as evidence that the Commission’s vote was actually a land grab.

”If a park is why you are taking it away, you all have to come up with money,” said attorney James Benjamin, Aaronson’s law partner, who said that if the city wanted the land it should have to pay up.

”You can’t do it under the guise of some secondary effects that don’t exist to move it to a place that nobody wants it,” Benjamin said.

Attorneys for the club said they hoped to persuade city leaders to reconsider. If not, a lawsuit is likely, Aaronson said.

Richard Fee, a Tampa attorney who has helped local governments draft similar ordinances since the early 1990s, said laws regulating adult businesses are constantly evolving and are among the most challenging cases for the courts to decide.

”It’s a complex analysis, to put it mildly,” he said.