Geneva delays action on adult-business zoning

The Geneva committee of the whole Monday postponed designating where sexually oriented businesses can be located, to see if it can come up with a way to eliminate one of two potential areas.

“It just makes me uncomfortable,” said 2nd Ward Alderman Robert Piper, about the idea of having strip clubs or adult-products stores in the Glengarry Industrial Park on East State Street. He suggested deleting it from the ordinance.

The park contains several businesses and a McDonald's restaurant. It is in the 5th Ward.

Geneva is adding “adult uses” to permissible uses in areas zoned for light industrial uses. The proposal calls for prohibiting such businesses within 750 feet of a house, school, day-care center or house of worship.

Community development director Dick Untch cautioned that the less area Geneva designates as eligible for adult uses, the less legally defensible its position would be if a business challenged it.

If the Glengarry Industrial Park is eliminated, that would leave only an area east of Kirk Road. Every other light-industrial district is small enough that the 750-foot buffer eliminates them.

Untch and city attorney Charles Radovich will figure out what size buffer would eliminate Glengarry and bring the matter back to the city council committee of the whole

No one has asked to open an adult-use business in Geneva, a town known more for its charming boutiques. The city does not have any zoning laws regarding adult uses, so theoretically an adult business could locate in several business districts throughout town just like other clubs, restaurants or stores.

The proposed ordinance also regulates the hours such businesses may be open, whether liquor can be served, what kind of activities can take place and licensing of owners and employees, among other things

A resident of the neighborhood just north of Glengarry Industrial Park said not only is the park visible from his house, children from the neighborhood often go to the McDonald's.

“That industrial park is an extension of our neighborhood,” said John Rice, who lives on Glengarry Drive.

The city can't prohibit sexually oriented businesses entirely, as the content of their products and performances is protected under free-speech provisions of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution, federal courts have ruled.