Judge Puts Brakes On ​“Planet Venus”

A plan to convert a Wallace Street warehouse into a ​“Las Vegas-style” entertainment complex hit a roadblock when a state judge upheld a city law that prohibits two strip clubs from being located less than 1,500 feet apart.

On April 28, state Superior Court Judge Michael Kamp issued that ruling in the case Julio Carmona v. Board of Zoning Appeals of the City of New Haven.

The decision marked the end of nearly two years of legal battles over Peter Forchetti’s plans to build out the club — dubbed ​“Planet Venus” — in a 1960s-era concrete warehouse at 203 Wallace St.

Thanks to the judge’s recent ruling, those plans are now on hold.

In a Wednesday phone interview with the Independent, Forchetti promised to appeal the court’s decision.

“I don’t know where the court’s, where this judge’s decision, came from,” he said. ​“I don’t know what he was thinking. He clearly didn’t do his homework. … All the work we put into this. It just boggles me.”

Forchetti, who ran the now-closed Scores strip club that previously operated out of the Hamilton Street clock factory building, first won zoning relief from the Board of Zoning Appeals for ​“Planet Venus” in July 2019.

In particular, the local zoning board—overriding city staff’s recommendation of denial—approved a special exception permitting an adult cabaret with liquor service operating between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. and a variance to locate an adult cabaret 1,100 feet from another existing strip club where a minimum distance of 1,500 feet is required by current city law.

The 203 Wallace St. warehouse is roughly 1,100 feet from the strip club Catwalk, which is located at 325 East St. The now-shuttered Scores was roughly 700 feet away from Catwalk.

Less than two weeks after the BZA granted Forchetti that zoning relief, a New Haven resident named Julio Carmona filed an appeal in state court, seeking to overturn the zoning board’s decision.

In that original complaint, and in an amended version from February 2020, Carmona argued that ​“as a taxpayer of the city of New Haven,” he was ​“aggrieved” by the BZA’s decision to grant a variance without finding that Forchetti had a specific hardship to back up his zoning relief request.

(In state land-use legal parlance, a ​“hardship” is defined as a unique difficulty inherent to the land itself. “[M]ere financial loss does not constitute hardship warranting granting of variance,” state law reads, “[unless] loss is so great as to amount to confiscation of applicant’s property, [a] variance might be justified.”)

In his April 28 decision, which can be read in full here, Judge Kamp noted that, prior to the BZA’s July 2019 vote in support of the variance, individual commissioners said that there was ​“a lot of community support for” this new strip club project. They also said ​“there was really no change in, you know, the distance to make it significant,” noting that Forchetti’s previous strip club, Scores, had been located just 700 feet away from Catwalk before it was evicted by the clock factory redevelopers.

Kamp wrote that ​“such statements do not satisfy the requirement that the board render a ​‘formal official collective statement of reasons for its actions.’”

The judge then turned to other parts of the original variance application and approval process to see if he could find a more official ​“collective statement” about why the zoning board agreed to grant the variance at that time.

He didn’t find anything up to legal land-use snuff.

“In this case, where the board failed to render a formal, official, collective statement for granting the variance, the courts’ search of the entire record reveals that Forchetti failed to establish that he had proven that he had an exceptional difficulty or unusual hardship needed to justify the variance of the 1500 foot rule pursuant to 42.3 (b) (2) of the ordinance.”

The mere fact that Forchetti was not able to renew his lease for Scores at its previous St. John Street location ​“does not alone constitute an unusual hardship,” the judge continued. As noted in the City Plan Department’s original advisory report that recommended denial of the zoning relief, there are four different zoning districts where a strip club use is permitted.

“Although the record reflects that Forchetti determined that the proposed location was most desirable to relocate his business because of the characteristics of the building, that preference does not constitute a hardship, particularly in light of the fact that there were multiple zoning districts available to him where his proposed business would be allowed without the need for a variance.”

The judge also found that Forchetti’s subsequent legal argument that moving Scores from its previous location on St. John Street reduced that business’s previous ​“nonconformity” — because Scores was located closer to Catwalk than ​“Planet Venus” would be — didn’t fly.

“A search of the record reveals that this argument was not the basis for the board’s decision to grant the variance, nor was it even raised before the board. Forchetti did not propose a reduction of a nonconforming use, but rather the relocation of a nonconforming use from one location to another within the same zone. The proposed relocation of Scores New Haven to a new location that is approximately 400 feet further away than it was from another adult cabaret does not constitute the reduction of a nonconforming use.

“Moreover, cases in which our appellate courts have relied upon the elimination or reduction of nonconformities as an independent basis for granting a variance have involved alterations in the use of the same parcel, not the relocation of a use from one parcel to another or the creation of a new, less nonconforming use on a different parcel.”

Therefore, Kamp found, the BZA acted ​“illegally, arbitrarily, and in abuse of its discretion” when it granted Forchetti’s application for a use variance to allow for the development of ​“Planet Venus.”

He then sustained Carmona’s appeal, and reversed the BZA’s July 2019 decision.