It wasn't exactly the type of transparency that the Winter Park City Commission liked to get its feathers ruffled over in the public spotlight, so at its regularly scheduled meeting on May 9 - amid the standard municipal fanfare of bond issuance and building safety - the self-proclaimed City of Culture and Heritage excused itself for 10 quiet minutes of private deliberation at 7:50 p.m. The mayor, commissioners and legal staff then huddled together in room 200 to discuss an ongoing problem: the adult-themed thorn in the city's side known as Club Harem.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the "lawfully closed" discussion did not involve new zoning strategies to close the vaunted twin-domed Lee Road watering hole previously known as "The Booby Trap" (for obvious reasons), nor did it involve more talk of police intervention into whatever lifestyle issues - drugs, crime, nudity - the city's only strip club ostensibly brought along with its very existence. Instead, the discussion lasted just long enough for the city government to sign off on a $250,000 payout to Club Harem and its attorney, Steve Mason, to settle a federal lawsuit that was filed last year. It was a muted move more than five years in the making, one that gives the appearance that the city is finally giving in and accepting blame for its sloppy, if not illegal, handling of the once thriving adult entertainment club.

But there would be no apologies that didn't include dollar signs. Written into the settlement agreement was a little bit of damage control: "No party, including any employee, agent or attorney for a party hereto, shall make any statement disparaging the other party or disparaging any employee, agent or attorney of a party. In any public statement, the parties and their agents/attorneys shall state only that this case was amicably resolved and that neither party admitted liability."

Given the years of complaints filed against the city by Mason and other attorneys, given the spate of police personnel fired or demoted throughout numerous investigations, given that the end result - a quarter of a million dollars being handed over to a strip club by a city at the end of its financial tether - was, in fact, public record, that explanation remains hard to believe. The details are all still out there; the city just paid a hefty price to try to keep them quiet, or, more likely, to keep them from getting worse.

Mason filed his lawsuit on behalf of Club Harem's ownership, Hugh Johnson Enterprises Inc. - whose principals, Carol and Gerald Uranick, had been operating the business for more than a decade - in the U.S. District Court-Middle District of Florida on Sept. 20, 2010. The move came after a litany of perceived infractions by the city (many of which have been reported by the Orlando Weekly) - so many that Mason, a First-Amendment attorney, felt comfortable taking the city to task on the constitutionality of its various punitive actions.

Ever since Winter Park annexed the area that included Club Harem's stretch of Lee Road in 2004 - the city allegedly hoped to leap-frog the property to get to the stronger property and business tax base beyond it - the club came under unprecedented scrutiny by city officials and police.

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