Rick's Club in Lake City and the gas station owned by former Gov. Albert D. Rosellini.
Related Content
More About
EIGHT PARKING SPOTS. Thats what the war over Ricks strip club is about? A decade of neighborhood battles, thousands in legal fees, thousands more in political contributions? Just to rezone a dab of Lake City into an accessory parking lot?
At least $33,000 in City Council campaign donations are linked to the club. According to interviews and public documents, the club found a pair of supporters in council members Judy Nicastro and Heidi Wills, who got most of those donations. They persevered in the face of a point-by-point rezone rebuttal by other council members and persuasive evidence that a land-use change was unwarranted.
As for those eight paltry parking spots, theyre gold platedhighly prized by a club so seriously in need of parking it has been willing to spend a lot of effort on a rezone. Ricks needs to accommodate a big nude-dance audience and an even bigger crowd thats expected to arrive once a nearly $200,000 expansion is completed on Lake City Way Northeast. As City Council staffer Bob Morgan explained recently, Ricks is legally required to have 34 parking spaces. It now has 46 and will add 15 after the remodel. Yet at peak hours, even those 61 spaces likely wont be enough. It turns out, as well, that in January, about the time the club renewed its effort to rezone the small lot, it lost 30 parking spaces it was using at night on a lot next door.
Former Gov. Albert D. Rosellini owns the adjoining property and was letting the spaces to club owner and friend Frank Colacurcio Jr. But use of Rosellinis land for the nighttime parking is illegal, the city says. So even with the 15 added remodel slots and eight more from the rezone, Ricks ends up with a net loss of parking spaces for its remodeled club. Eight is not enough, but no less crucial.
In reconstructing the story behind the rezone, Seattle Weekly found a lot of thought-provoking coincidences. No evidence indicates a direct link between campaign contributions and the behavior of City Council members. But no one could be blamed for wondering if there is one.
IT SEEMS CURIOUS, for example, that no one told the City Council about the pending remodel. Not until they approved the parking-lot rezone, council members say, did they hear about the Ricks expansion plan. A city permit application had been on file since Januaryavailable for all the world to see online at the citys Department of Design, Construction, and Land Use (DCLU) Web site. Despite all the meetings, calls, e-mails, and document exchanges between the council and DCLU over the rezone, no one seems to have brought up the pending expansion. Yet it is the most likely motive behind all that rezone lobbying and political cash flowsome of it possibly in violation of city campaign law.
Says DCLU spokesperson Alan Justad: Because this type of application [the expansion] does not require council approval or review, we did not inform the council of the fact that it was under review. At an earlier airing of the rezone issue before a hearing examiner, he says, the DCLU planner did state that the owner was planning to submit an application to expand but that it would not include the rezone area. City Council staffer Morgan, however, has reviewed the hearing tape and says the expansion was not part of the record. Justad is not aware of the council ever asking DCLU about the expansion project.
Other important details of the dispute seemed to have gotten lost along the way, as well, such as the issue of crime at the club and the fact the club was making itself better known to elected and other officials at City Hall.
ONGOING SINCE 1989, the rezone war ended a month ago in the wake of the heady rush of campaign contributions. By a 5-4 vote, the council reversed decisions by both a hearing examiner and city zoning inspectors and granted a parking lot land-use change from residential to commercial. That incensed neighbors, who had tired of the noise, lights, sex acts, nudity, and rubbers in their surroundings. They thought they had won this one long agowhen previous councils turned down the rezone twice.
But neighbors didnt have the City Hall access the club had, through Rosellini and Seattle attorney Gil Levy. Levy, a regular City Hall campaign donor and criminal defense attorney, represents both Rosellini, the former governor, and the club, which is operated by Frank Colacurcio Jr. Both Rosellini and Colacurcio were fighting similar city parking disputes at their adjoining Lake City properties. Levy also represents Colacurcio on legal and regulatory issues related to the strip trade. Colacurcio operates four nude clubs in the region and is regularly embroiled in freedom-of-expression cases, for example.
Rosellini, whose property includes a gas station and car wash next door to the club, was governor from 1957 to 1965 and is an old friend of the Colacurcio family. Now 93, he says it was a coincidence that he bought the gas station property next to the clubI didnt know who owned it when I bought itand says hes not real familiar with Colacurcios dispute. He leaves those kinds of details to the gas stations manager.
