Rebuffed Sunnyside bar owner tries to expose city

SUNNYSIDE -- When Charles Egley applied for a business license to hold adult entertainment in downtown Sunnyside, City Council members all but brought the city to a screeching halt, imposing a moratorium and rewriting laws.

Egley calls it overreacting.

"I don't know what they got all up in arms about," says the Yakima business and property owner.

Egley, a salesman at Valley Ford Nissan in Yakima, just wanted to hire women in shorts and tank tops to dance inside his Tequila Sports Bar.

"It was never my plan to have a strip bar," says the 68-year-old Egley.

But the words "adult entertainment" and "exotic dancing" on his application raised red flags in a town once founded as a moral utopia by leaders of a Christian denomination.

"It's a very conservative community," says Mark Kunkler, city attorney.

Combined with a recent proposal for topless dancing in Zillah and controversies over the location of adult bookstores in Yakima, Sunnyside officials have decided it's time to revamp their city's ordinances to regulate adult entertainment in more detail.

While they do their homework, City Council members have imposed a moratorium on all adult entertainment.

They plan to hold a public hearing about the issue at the next City Council meeting at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 25.

Egley says he will be there, arguing the moratorium should not affect him because he applied before City Council enacted it on July 14. Besides, "adult entertainment" was the city's term, not his, he claims.

Encountering resistance

For one thing, Kunkler says, the new laws may better define adult entertainment in the first place. That would have prevented some of the confusion over Egley's application.

Also, the City Council might impose a certain distance that dancers must stay from patrons, making lap dances illegal, or mandate background checks for all employees. Maybe adult book or video stores will have different rules.

Yakima has such laws. So do Bellevue and Shoreline, where Sunnyside's new city manager Eric Swansen has worked in the past. So does Grandview, which passed in 1996 a similar "pre-emptive strike" against adult entertainment "just in case," recalls City Councilman Jesse Palacios, the mayor at the time.

Adult entertainment, if that's what Egley really has in mind, would not have been allowed at his Sixth Street bar in Sunnyside anyway because it's too close to Centennial Square, a city-owned park. Currently, Sunnyside's code stipulates no adult entertainment businesses within 1,000 feet of parks, churches, residential neighborhoods or schools.

Kunkler says the city is not overreacting but trying to update laws before they get a lot of requests.

One thing Sunnyside leaders cannot do is completely ban adult entertainment. It's protected
under the U.S. Constitution as free expression. They can't write zoning codes that would leave them no legal spot, either.

"Local governments can't really do much about legislating on morality," says Pam James, a legal consultant for the Washington Municipal Research Council.

However, courts at all levels in the United States have ruled that cities can regulate adult entertainment businesses in detailed ways to prevent "secondary effects," such as prostitution and drugs. Supreme Court cases also allow cities to point to other communities' studies as justification for their new laws.

That's what Kunkler is working on, scouring statistics from cities across the country.

James calls Sunnyside's move good planning. However, she does not see any rise in adult entertainment businesses in small cities, in spite of the recent proposals in Zillah and Sunnyside. They usually stick to big communities or rural towns near military bases where they find consistent clientele.

She has received more calls lately from cities wanting to regulate latte stands with baristas wearing bikinis or lingerie, such as Brewlesque in Yakima. There's little they can do about those, either, unless they find true nudity.

It's all in the definitions, James says. State law has graphic definitions for "lewd" behavior and nudity. Cities, such as Sunnyside, usually follow suit.

No nudity in town history

The Lower Valley has an erratic history when it comes to nudity.

Most folks remember no strip clubs in the last three decades, though Toppenish's murals pay homage to brothels of the Wild West turn of the 20th century.

In Zillah, protesters filled a hearing room in June where they shouted down proposed exotic dancing at the Tuscan Sands Casino. However, that sentiment didn't seem to faze community leaders, including Mayor Gary Clark, from attending a private fundraiser in April with burlesque dancers wearing pasties.

Sunnyside is almost the antithesis of vice, historically. It was founded by leaders of the Progressive Brethren Christian denomination, which used church funds to purchase a bankrupt townsite in 1898, according to Roscoe Sheller's history "Courage and Water." They called it the Christian Cooperative Community.

Fliers recruiting families from the Midwest boasted of a "moral community" with "no saloons, no blizzards, no pear blight." Early laws included a property forfeiture clause against anyone caught gambling, drinking alcohol or consorting with prostitutes.

Many moral codes lasted until after the Hanford project in the 1940s, said John Saras, a board member of the Sunnyside Museum. In the 1950s, stores rarely opened on Sundays.

The closest Sunnyside has come to adult entertainment — legally anyway — was a few one-time nude reviews at a downtown bar. Critics stood shoulder to shoulder in City Hall to protest while administrators insisted on extra police security.

Even today, Sunnyside's City Council members begin their meetings with a prayer, led by Sunnyside ministers.

Kerry Turley, a deacon at St. Joseph's Catholic Church, is scheduled to do the honors at that Aug. 25 meeting.

Turley hopes Sunnyside City Council members make it harder, not easier, to open adult entertainment in town.

"I'm sure that the churches' stand is that they would like to see them as tight as possible," he says.

Egley, whose family members once owned clothing stores in Sunnyside and Yakima, doesn't mind because he insists his bar would have allowed less skin than those latte stands. He was not even planning to give up his liquor license. State law prohibits serving alcohol where there's any nudity.

"It just got blown out of proportion and it's still out of proportion," he says.

* Ross Courtney can be reached at 930-8798 or rcourtney@yakimaherald.com.

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