Get the whip: County caught with licensing pants down
Posted by John L. Smith
Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009 at 02:49 PM
When you're in the business of role-playing, it's important to
remember your lines.
Take the entertaining theater that takes place day in the valley
between Clark County Business License officials and owners of local sex clubs.
Fact is, the county doesn't license sex clubs. It prefers to issues
licenses for gyms, book stores, restaurants, juice bars and the like,
then turn the other way while the businesses are operated as sex
clubs. In exchange, the sex club owners are generally wise to keep up
the false front and go along with the regulatory hypocrisy in order
to get along with government bureaucrats who could easily shut them down.
The county issues licenses, but the licensee must remember to keep
a straight face. He must remember his lines and play the established role.
Slap-and-tickle club operator Michael Powers forgot his lines
recently, and I think it could return to haunt him.
Powers owns the Power Exchange on Highland Drive. The Power Exchange
isn't licensed by Clark County as a BDSM (bondage and sadomasochism,
that is) club because the county doesn't issue such licenses. Sex
clubs are illegal, even if the person's sexual proclivities are bent
toward whips and chains and the like. The county does, however, issue
licenses for tanning salons and silk-screening shops, and Powers has
licenses for such endeavors.
The fact his store also features a dungeon and private areas where
customers can role-play and get their spank on is something you'd
presume he wouldn't exactly advertise. You know, given the licensing
issues and all.
But you'd be wrong. In a recent issue of CityLife, the weekly
owned by the company that also owns the Review-Journal, Powers let
the cat-o'-nine tails out of the bag, so to speak.
Powers: "It's like [the Disneyland ride] Pirates of the Caribbean,
but the pirates are having sex."
Well, shiver me timbers.
Powers: "If I'm going to have a business that makes $2 million a
year off people spanking each other, they want to make sure they're
getting their cut."
If you're going to have a business that makes $2 million a year
off people spanking each other, Mr. Powers, you'd better remember your lines.
CityLife Managing Editor Andrew Kiraly: "The tanning business and
clothing line, he reasons, give the government something specific to
put on paper. As for what goes on in the rooms once men and women pay
the entrance fee, Powers is laissez-faire."
Powers: "I'm like a gym. People pay a fee to use the facility, and
what they do is their business."
Oddly enough, legally it's also the county's business. And Powers
broke one of the great unwritten rules governing the operation of a
whips-and-chains joint, sex club, or sexual soak-and-poke around
here: Don't admit what goes on behind closed doors, or the county
might be forced to close your doors.
Last June, sex club operator David Cooper ran into a county
steamroller after he failed to appropriately prepare his "restaurant"
called Sextasy in the sleazy Commercial Center. It also hurt him that
he was too free to admit the kind of business he planned to do there.
The county shut him down. Since then, he hasn't been shy about
calling out the bureaucrats.
"I think that story represents a full-blown admission of skirting
the rules," Cooper says.
And what was good enough for him, Cooper says, ought to be good
enough for the Power Exchange.
When it comes to enforcing its own regulations, Clark County has
never been very good at keeping its pants on.
Find this article at:
http://www.lvrj.com/blogs/smith/Get_the_whip_County_caught_with_licensing_pants_down.html