City of Jacksonville pays strip clubs $60,000

Jacksonville city lawyers have agreed to a deal paying $60,000 and limiting how police deal with exotic dancers to settle parts of two federal lawsuits by local strip clubs.

The agreement leaves undecided the clubs’ arguments that a minimum age of 21 for dancers adopted by Jacksonville’s City Council in 2020 is unconstitutional.

“The parties request that the court determine that issue on the merits,” city General Counsel Jason Teal and strip club attorney Gary Edinger told U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan in a settlement notice filed last week.

But the deal does roll back other rules that dancers and club operators objected to in suits filed in 2019 and 2020, setting fees for dancer permits and reestablishing an old Sheriff’s Office practice — in most cases — of issuing ticket-like citations instead of jailing dancers for “costume violations” or performances that simulate sex.

The agreement also requires the Sheriff’s Office vice unit to delete a database of dancer photos it maintains after the photos have been kept for the time required by government record-retention rules.

And the agreement sets limits on police access to dressing rooms and other parts of the clubs that aren’t public.

Officers won’t inspect areas that aren’t public without a warrant or permission from the person running the club, the agreement says, and dancers will only be “processed” through those inspections in public areas unless the club management agrees otherwise.

Besides those concessions, the settlement required the city to pay $60,000 to Edinger to "be allocated between the plaintiffs as they shall determine." The money has been paid, this week's notice said.

The agreement basically settles two sets of disputes with police and City Hall that had been raised separately by people in the strip club industry.

Edinger, well established as a strip-club industry lawyer, had sued the city in 2019 on behalf of dancers and the operators of two businesses, Emperor’s Gentleman’s Club and Flashdancers, complaining police had stopped following enforcement rules they’d agreed to back in 2004 to settle a different lawsuit.

Then in 2020, after the city adopted its 21-or-older age requirement for dancers — the cutoff is 18 in other Florida communities — and other rules that were described as discouraging human trafficking, Edinger filed a 28-count, 140-page lawsuit on behalf of Wacko’s and another dozen clubs and several dancers arguing the new laws were unconstitutional.

Corrigan ruled a year ago that the licensing requirements in the 2020 law didn’t meet legal standards the U.S. Supreme Court had set to avoid violating dancers’ rights to expression under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

But the two sides of the case had agreed that the judge would only take up that issue then, leaving a stack of other concerns to be resolved through steps like the mediation that produced this week’s settlement.

A notice the lawyers sent Corrigan said the two dies are still talking about who will cover some attorneys’ fees and about the possibility of other changes to local ordinances to resolve some disagreements that are separate from the fight over dancer age requirements.