Strip club: Expansion should be OK’d

MILFORD — Seven months after asking a judge to set aside a $200,000 judgment won by exotic dancers for lost wages and overtime, a local strip club is once again seeking relief from the state’s Appellate Court.

In an appeal filed last month, the Keepers club said the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals should have approved its plans to expand into two adjoining units — and that a Superior Court judge erred in affirming the ZBA’s decision.

The appeal called the result of the trial court’s ruling “bizarre in the extreme.”

The club had gone to the ZBA after the city planner rejected its application for expansion. The planner cited the business’ nature as a pre-existing non-conforming, and said it couldn’t get a variance because the zoning regulations consider adult businesses “detrimental to the community.”

The ZBA unanimously upheld the planner’s rejection, so the Woodmont Road club appealed to court.

In an order last month, the judge ruled that the planner had exceeded his authority and that his denial was null and void — but denied the club’s appeal on the grounds that “there is no appeal from any decision of the city of Milford’s zoning board of appeals over which the court can preside.”

In its petition appealing the judge’s ruling, the club said the decision “means that the City Planner is above the law…barring the door to the Planning and Zoning Board and the ZBA, as the case may be, by rejecting any zoning application which he feels lacks merit and simply does not like, even though he has no authority to do so, sanguine in the knowledge that although his action is null and void as a matter of law, the blocked applicant has nowhere to go to appeal.”

The appeal said the decision would allow the city planner to “go rogue and run the department illegally” without recourse.

“It is not hard to imagine the parade of horribles, mischief, abuses and injustices which could ensue from this ruling,” the appeal said. “This bizarre result cannot be allowed to stand.”

In an email, the club’s lawyer, Jonathan Klein, said the case involves “a question of great public importance” because “the erroneous decision of the trial court creates a potential negative effect on the processing of all future zoning applications” in the city.

In a response filed last week, a lawyer for the Zoning Board of Appeals said Keepers should have appealed the planner’s decision a different way.

“The issue is not whether the City Planner correctly rejected the application, but rather whether he had the authority to reject it at all,” the response said.

The city said that instead of going to the ZBA first, Keepers should have filed an action seeking an order telling the planner to forward the application to the proper land use board.

Klein declined to comment on the city’s response.

The club’s appeal comes nearly eight months after arguments in a separate case before the Appellate Court after the club lost a lawsuit from six exotic dancers saying they were not paid a minimum wage or for overtime, which the club has denied.

The case was referred to arbitration in 2016. In 2019, after two days of testimony, an arbitrator sided with the dancers, and calculated damages as $113,560 with $85,000 in attorneys’ fees.

However, the dancers are still waiting to be paid. The club’s former president, Joseph Regensburger, who has worked for reputed mobster Gus Curcio as a titular “figurehead,” according to deposition testimony, filed for bankruptcy after the club lost the lawsuit.

The dancers’ lawyer, Kenneth Krayeske, said he has obtained bank records and deposition testimony in the bankruptcy case which shows the club makes up to $7,000 per week in profit.