Joining a trend among local governments, Salem is considering amending its city code to restrict the places where "adult businesses" can locate.

The planning commission will hold a public hearing at 7 p.m. Wednesday on three proposed revisions to the zoning ordinance adding "adult business" as a commercial-use type and setting standards for such businesses' locations.

The Salem City Council is tentatively scheduled to take up the matter Sept. 25.

"It's one of those things that had not been addressed specifically" in the code before, said Melinda Payne, Salem's director of planning and development. "We looked around and saw a lot of jurisdictions doing the same thing."

Payne said the city has had a couple of inquiries from people about such businesses, but no one has filed an application to open one. "We're trying to help clarify" what the city wants to do about such businesses, she said.

City Attorney Steve Yost drew up the ordinance, she said, "looking at all the jurisdictions in the area to see what they've done." Roanoke County, for instance, enacted similar rules in October.

While courts have ruled that it is unconstitutional to write laws so restrictively that they effectively ban such businesses, localities are free to limit their locations based on concerns about potential negative effects.

"We were very clear about making sure it was not too confining," Payne said, "but also would take into consideration our schools, churches and day care centers."

The new rules would limit such businesses to areas zoned as Highway Business District and keep them at least 300 feet from day care centers, educational facilities and schools, religious assemblies and most residential and agricultural areas.

In practical terms, that means such businesses would be allowed only on certain sections of West Main Street, East Main Street and Apperson Drive. "That's pretty much where most of our retail is anyway," Payne said.

The way the proposal has been written, approximately 46 percent, or 312 out of 679 acres, zoned as Highway Business will be eligible for such businesses.

The proposed rules would ban the display of sexually explicit materials from the windows of such businesses, limit signs, regulate lighting for entrances and parking lots, and require continuous videotaping of those.

Restricted businesses would include adult bookstores, adult video stores, adult model studios, adult motels, adult movie theaters, adult nightclubs, adult retail stores and "any other establishment that regularly exploits an interest in matters relating to specified sexual activities or specified anatomical areas or regularly features live entertainment intended for the sexual stimulation or titillation of patrons."

Owners would be required to pay a $500 application fee to file for a permit from the chief of police and submit to a criminal background check.

The new ordinance would specifically ban the exposure of an entertainer's pubic region or genitals, "less than the majority of each buttock," or a woman's nipple or the lower half of her breasts. It also would prohibit real or simulated sex acts, lap dancing or stuffing a tip into an entertainer's costume.

The proposal draws on now widely used justifications that include the assertion that sexually oriented businesses, "because of their very nature, have a deleterious effect on both the existing businesses located around them and the surrounding residential areas adjacent to them, causing increased crime and the downgrading of property values."

The new rule's purpose, it reads, is "to regulate sexually oriented businesses in order to promote the health, safety, morals and general welfare of the citizens of the city."

The resolution also says it is not intended "to restrict or deny access by adults to sexually oriented materials protected by the First Amendment."