In a special City Council meeting Monday, the city's lawmakers met at 6:30 a.m. to tighten sex-business laws for the growing south Utah County city.

Perhaps worried that a new sexually oriented business might slip through the city gates this week without the new regulations, officials said they met early to accommodate Mayor Dale Barney, who was planning to leave town for a week at 7 a.m.

Needless to say, there was little early morning public involvement as the council voted 5-0 for the amendments.

"It's something they felt like they needed to act upon," said Assistant City Manager Seth Perrins, noting Barney walked out the door promptly at 7 a.m. "We can't eliminate them, but we can require certain things and certain locations."

Spanish Fork's ordinance was amended to mirror similar additions to Provo's sexually oriented business laws, which are similar to laws passed in the Weber County community of Roy.

Roy's ordinances were upheld last year in a federal court case, so Spanish Fork officials communicated with Roy officials in forming the amendments.

"We felt like we better do something quickly before we saw the effects of those businesses," Perrins said. “The city doesn't want those businesses saying, 'Oh we can't go [to Provo, so] we'll go farther south.' ”

One major change will clear up the definition of an adult bookstore.

The law previously classified such bookstores as those that exclude minors to more than 15 percent of their retail floor or shelf space. The updated version spells it out in fine print.

Now an adult bookstore is defined as one meeting any of the following criteria:

At least 15 percent of its displayed merchandise is sexual in nature; at least 15 percent of its sales revenue is from sexual items; at least 15 percent of the wholesale or retail value of its displayed items are sex-based or it devotes at least 15 percent of its interior sales to sexual items.

Businesses considered to be sexually oriented can locate only in designated city areas, and operators must pay for a more expensive business license ($100 a year) and employee licenses ($50 a year each).

Spanish Fork's revised law also adds "sexual device shops" and "sexual encounter centers" to the list of adult businesses.

Sexual encounter centers are locations offering seminude wrestling matches, and noncollege, nonuniversity or noneducational places where seminude models can be observed.

City Councilman Paul Christensen said there isn't a particular business that prompted the early bird revisions; city brass just wanted to have defined restrictions in place if new businesses suspect to the law come to town.

"We know it's probably going to happen, so we just wanted to be prepared," he said.

thollingshead@sltrib.com