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Protecting Community Standards

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 8, 2008

The small town of Lavonia, along Interstate 85 in northeast Georgia, has the right idea about how to handle undesirable businesses that peddle flesh and clutter interstate highways with sexually suggestive billboards: If you can't shut them down legally, buy them out.

For close to a million dollars, city officials recently purchased such a business - Cafe Risque. The name should ring a bell with frequent travelers along Interstate 75 in north-central Florida because there's another such establishment in the Alachua County town of Micanopy. It's a restaurant that doubles as a strip club - or vice versa - and it tastelessly advertises with billboards that read, "We Bare All," "We Dare to Bare" and "Adult Toys."
Lavonia officials didn't want Cafe Risque when it opened in 2001. Some were steamed after first hearing the business would be a "Skeeter's Big Biscuit" eatery. We can only imagine their shock.

To end years of disputes and the ugly effects on their community, Lavonia decided that buying Cafe Risque was more important than paying off bonds on the water plant, as originally planned.

Good for city leaders for protecting their community's standards. Maybe Micanopy officials, who also have tussled with their Cafe Risque, can follow suit - if they have the money and the owner is willing. Doing so surely would rid I-75 of an eyesore and an embarrassment for parents with children in the car.

A fair-market purchase isn't a bad idea for any community that wants to protect its standards, get rid of troublesome businesses or purchase land for economic development. This isn't to suggest that elected leaders should start buying up city blocks, though, especially considering declines in revenues.

But Tampa officials took the right approach last year in deciding to buy the longtime nuisance in east Tampa that was Gene's Bar, for about $200,000. The city demolished the building to make way for development and the community is better off.

Similarly, the city of Sarasota plans to purchase a strip club as part of a plan to build a baseball stadium that might lure the Boston Red Sox, who spring train in Fort Myers.

Closing the Scoreboard wasn't lost on Sarasota City Commissioner Kelly Kirschner. "It is almost an afterthought that a topless bar is getting shut down right next to our park," she said. "I think there is a larger conversation here rather than 'we were five bucks above the going market rates.' "

The folks in Lavonia certainly thought so.

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