In the Kenai Peninsula, Good Time Charlies boasts the only strip club within 120 miles. In the summer, it has 55 entertainers who dance on stage or if you prefer, on your table, either topless or nude. They do this in a building in Soldotna, off the Sterling Highway, atop a parcel of land owned by the State of Alaska.
Surprisingly, the State of Alaska is the landlord to a strip joint.
The Alaska state Department of Transportation bought the .79 acre parcel of land in 1991, when it planned to widen the highway. It paid $249,000 for it then (now it’s only assessed at $123,400) and instead of kicking the property owner, Charles Cunningham, off of the land, it chose to lease it to him for $2490 a year.
That’s less than $210 a month.
DOT spokeswoman Jill Reese admitted that it was an “unusual situation,” but that DOT wanted to err on the side of fairness and not put someone out of business, no matter the type of business, before the land was needed.
Until 2007, the State of Rhode Island also owned a building that housed a strip club called Desire. Desire’s rent was $7,000 a month. Rhode Island DOT thought it was getting a good deal for tax payers. The public, however, didn’t think that it was healthy for the state to be benefiting from sin quite so blatantly. The state forced it to move out shortly after it made the news.
In Alaska that probably won’t happen anytime soon. We don’t have as much of a puritanical strain up here. And we’re an “owner” state that is constitutionally mandated to maximize the resources for all.
Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com
Glad to see that “Good Time Charlies” is still giving the State some return! Even $2,490 a year is more than the state will get from the properties that KABATA has bought. That is better than the $35,400 in property taxes that Anchorage loses per year, since KABATA bought 2 houses and a hotel to make way for a bridge that likely will never happen! That KABATA is proposing to spend hundreds of thousands more to demolish those structures before they have financing to actually build the project is a complete waste of state resources.
That the “Bridge to Nowhere” is not financially feasible is underscored by the fact that the bridge will not move forward unless KABATA convinces the Legislature to give them a blank check to make “availability payments” to the bridge contractor, regardless of how much toll revenue comes in. OK, KABATA’s proposed bill tries to limit that blank check to “Only” $1.14 Billion. But what happens when they hit that “limit”? Just go back and ask the Legislature for more $$$$$.
Alaska State fiscal oversight isn’t often practiced in our state. Rather, our governmental sight in this case is elsewhere (while sneaking over for a peek, during work breaks, if the dancing’s good.)