Court Opinion

ID: 9496775
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:34:59.085441+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:47.314946
License: Public Domain

COLE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
When this lawsuit commenced, adult businesses could be prohibited — per se or at the whim of local regulators' — -in the *837entire City. As a would-be proprietor of an adult business in the City, Brandywine is a proper party to challenge this scheme, and the suit survives the City’s subsequent optional and reversible amendment of the Ordinance. Because Article III permits our review of Brandywine’s claims, and because these claims establish that the challenged Ordinance violates the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent.

A. Standing

In holding that Brandywine lacks standing, the majority artificially slices Brandy-wine’s challenge into component parts— separating its challenge to the Ordinance as a whole into discrete challenges to the respective regulations governing zones B-3 and 1-2. But we must evaluate the city’s regulatory scheme in the aggregate: the First Amendment requires an adequate opportunity for adult businesses to operate in a given city, not in any particular zone. A total ban in either zone would be perfectly legal so long as the other provided sufficient space for adult businesses. See City of Renton v. Playtime Theatres, Inc., 475 U.S. 41, 106 S.Ct. 925, 89 L.Ed.2d 29 (1986). Moreover, that a total ban in one zone is constitutional in some circumstances does not mean that it would be constitutional alongside a total ban or other undue restrictions in all other zones. See, e.g., Schad v. Borough of Mount Ephraim, 452 U.S. 61, 75-76, 101 S.Ct. 2176, 68 L.Ed.2d 671 (1981); Christy v. City of Ann Arbor, 824 F.2d 489, 492 (6th Cir.1987). Brandywine argues — consistent with the First Amendment’s approach to the regulation of adult businesses — that given zone I-2’s restrictions, the restrictions on zone B-3 are unconstitutional. We can evaluate one zone without the other no more than we can measure night without day.
Moreover, the district court’s holding that this suit could not redress Brandy-wine’s injury, a conclusion that the majority implicitly ratifies, rests on a misreading of the Ordinance. The district court determined, as the City argued, that were we to determine that the Ordinance provides insufficient space for adult businesses, we would automatically nullify the restrictions on adult businesses operating in zone 1-2, allowing adult businesses full .access .to that zone and leaving all other zones’ restrictions unscathed. The Ordinance provides no such directions. It does provide that “[sjhould any section or provisions of the regulations be, for any reason, held void or invalid, it shall not affect any other section or provision thereof which is not itself void or invalid.” Thus, if Brandy-wine’s challenge could be separated into component parts, we could save the Ordinance by jettisoning only the offending part. But under Kentucky law, which governs whether we may sever a problem provision from its neighbors, see City of Lakewood v. Plain Dealer Publ’g Co., 486 U.S. 750, 772, 108 S.Ct. 2138, 100 L.Ed.2d 771 (1988), a statute cannot simply shed its lone unconstitutional provision when — as is the case here — all of the statute’s parts are inseparably connected. See KRS § 446.090. As I explained above, the First Amendment doctrine governing this challenge demands that we view the Ordinance in the aggregate. If the Ordinance provides inadequate space for adult businesses, we must invalidate the whole thing.
Brandywine’s challenge, including its requests for both monetary and injunctive relief, necessarily engulfs the entire Ordinance. Brandywine’s lack of connection with zone 1-2 — the supposed gap in its standing — is a red herring.

B. Mootness

The majority’s alternative basis for affirming the dismissal of Brandywine’s re*838quest for injunctive relief — that the action is moot — -flatly contradicts the Supreme Court and our own precedent. Because the City amended the Ordinance (less than a month) after Brandywine filed suit, the City retains the burden of showing that its amendments moot this challenge. In Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Envtl. Servs., Inc., 528 U.S. 167, 120 S.Ct. 693, 145 L.Ed.2d 610 (2000), the Supreme Court reaffirmed that “a defendant claiming that its voluntary compliance moots a case bears the formidable burden of showing that it is absolutely clear the allegedly wrongful behavior could not reasonably be expected to occur.” Id. at 190, 120 S.Ct. 693 (emphasis added). The possibility looms that the City will reenact the prior version of the Ordinance once this case is dismissed, and the City has offered no indication that its most recent amendment is permanent. And unlike a state or federal legislature, which must massage the esoteric desires of scores of representatives in two houses, a city council can enact new measures with relative ease. Indeed, the record demonstrates how readily and easily the City can amend the Ordinance: it did so twice in the five-month period between April 2001 and August 2001.
Yet the majority inverts the burden. According to the majority, today’s case is moot because City officials have not vowed to restore the offending provisions following dismissal. But Brandywine does not have to show that the challenged conduct will occur again; the City must make it “absolutely clear” that it will not. Thus, in Akers v. McGinnis, 352 F.3d 1030, 1035 (6th Cir.2003), we considered a challenge to certain regulations promulgated by the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC), even though these regulations had since been repealed. In rejecting the defendant’s contention that its voluntary repeal mooted the case, we noted that “as the promulgation of work rules appears to be solely within the discretion of the MDOC, there is no guarantee that MDOC will not change back to its older, stricter Rule as soon as this action terminates.” Id. at 1035. And in Rosales-Garcia v. Holland, 322 F.3d 386 (6th Cir.2003) (en banc), cert. denied, Snyder v. Rosales-Garcia, - U.S. -, 123 S.Ct. 2607, 156 L.Ed.2d 627 (2003), we rejected the government’s assertion that an immigrant’s challenge to her detention was mooted by her parole, because the INS had the discretion to return her to custody and the government had “made no ... promise [that her parole would continue uninterrupted].” Id. at 397.
At no point has the City promised that the offending scheme is gone for good. Short of such an assurance, it cannot meet its burden under Friends of the Earth. The majority’s refusal to hold the City to its burden is at odds with both Supreme Court and Sixth Circuit precedent. And it risks producing a cycle of amendment, mootness, and reamendment — the very cycle that mootness doctrine prohibits.

C. First Amendment

Because Article III allows us to consider Brandywine’s First Amendment challenges to the Ordinance, as it existed when Bran-dywine filed its complaint, we apply the familiar standards espoused by the Supreme Court. A total ban on adult business receives strict scrutiny; the restriction of such businesses to certain areas, however, we analyze as a time, place, and manner regulation. Renton, 475 U.S. at 46, 106 S.Ct. 925. Although the City prohibits adult businesses in zone B-3, it permits them in zone 1-2. Moreover, a time, place, and manner restriction must be justified without reference to the content of the speech. Here, the ordinance is aimed not at the content of adult businesses per se, but “rather at the secondary effects of *839such theaters on the surrounding community.” Id. at 47, 106 S.Ct. 925 (emphasis in original).
We therefore reach the case’s crux: “whether the [Ordinance] is designed to serve a substantial governmental interest and allows for reasonable alternative avenues of communication.” Id. at 50, 106 S.Ct. 925. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the City’s interest is substantial, the Ordinance provides for inadequate alternative spaces for adult businesses to operate. Even in zone 1-2, the one place in which the City purports to allow adult businesses, they would have to meet the requirements of a “conditional use.” The Ordinance defines a conditional use as one:
which is essential to or would promote the public health, safety, or welfare in one or more zones, but which would impair the integrity and character of the zone in which it is located, or in adjoining zones, unless restrictions on location, size, extent and character of the performance are imposed in addition to those imposed in the zoning regulation.
When considered in conjunction with the entire Ordinance, the amorphous criteria that an adult business must satisfy hardly provide a guarantee that adequate alternative avenues exist. Cf. Plain Dealer Publ’g Co., 486 U.S. at 769-70, 108 S.Ct. 2138 (invalidating restrictions on adult businesses that vest too much discretion to the government licensors). The First Amendment requires that the City “refrain from effectively denying [its citizens] a reasonable opportunity to open and operate an adult theater within the city.” Renton, 475 U.S. at 54, 106 S.Ct. 925. Under the Ordinance, any adult business that the City deems inconsistent with “the integrity and character of the zone” would find itself without any location in the City in which to operate — a result that the First Amendment prohibits.
Because I conclude that Brandywine has standing to challenge the Ordinance, that its challenge is not moot, and that the Ordinance violates the First Amendment, I would reverse the judgment of the district court and remand for the issuance of an injunction and the computation of Brandy-wine’s damages. I respectfully dissent.