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Voyeur dorm vs. Tarpon Springs: The return of a tangled Web

Ucanwatch.com left the city, but now a Bulgarian company's proposal has officials revisiting the adult-use ordinance.

By ELENA LESLEY, Times Staff Writer
Published August 19, 2007

TARPON SPRINGS - In the struggle between adult entertainers and the governments that regulate them, it's a constant battle to stay one step ahead.

"Someone always comes up with some angle that falls in the cracks," said city attorney Jim Yacavone. "Thirty years ago it was nudie bars. Then it was massage parlors."

And now this.

After receiving a recent inquiry from a Bulgarian company that wants to start a "voyeur dorm" in Florida, Tarpon Springs is revisiting its adult-use ordinance. While the city can't ban such an establishment outright, it can make life hard for would-be adult entrepreneurs.

"I don't feel that type of business is welcome in Tarpon Springs," said Mayor Beverley Billiris, who led the effort to shut down a voyeur dorm in the city six years ago. "But what we can do legally and constitutionally is another thing."

Voyeur dorms are particularly difficult to regulate, said Shauna Morris, an attorney for the city who is updating the city's adult use ordinance. The First Amendment protects the "speech" itself - any activities broadcast from the house - and patrons don't visit the location in person, as they would a strip club or an adult bookstore.

If there are no adverse effects on neighbors, "then they have the First Amendment right to use the airways," said city attorney John Hubbard.

The letter from Bulgarian company Power Vision Ltd., which Morris said was sent to other nearby cities, described how the company would rent space in Tarpon Springs equipped with web cams, microphones and other broadcasting equipment.

Materials produced will "be consisted of showing and exposing of specific anatomical zones and specific sexual activities," the letter reads.

A Largo representative for the company did not return phone calls or e-mails.

A similar business left town after Tarpon officials began targeting it for code violations.

Billiris was tipped off in 2001 by a concerned resident about the house on Kreamer Bayou. Activities were broadcast on the site ucanwatch.com, where viewers could see 10 to 14 women shower, sunbathe and engage in more racy pastimes.

At the time, the city argued that the business violated zoning because it was a commercial use in a residential area, Hubbard said.

But similar restrictions proposed in other cities didn't hold up in court. Tampa officials' attempt to use zoning regulations to shut down Voyeur Dorm, which broadcast the lives of several young women, was shot down by an appellate court in 2002.

Tarpon Springs never filed any charges or passed an ordinance to shutter ucanwatch.com, but the business left the city nonetheless.

"Maybe they decided it wasn't worth the fight," said Hubbard, who noted the operators racked up a number of code violation fines.

While it's unlikely the city can use zoning to control any incoming voyeur dorms, Morris said municipalities can regulate "secondary effects." Considerations such as traffic, noise, transitory living arrangements and a large number of unrelated people sharing a house are all avenues the city could use to ban a business from certain areas.

"Single-family residential doesn't mean a whole bunch of unrelated people taking pictures of themselves and sending them over the internet," Hubbard said.

Morris said she will continue to research the issue and hopes to have a draft ordinance for the city in September.

Elena Lesley can be reached at elesley@sptimes.com or 727 445-4167.

[Last modified August 18, 2007, 21:54:46]