Columbia County, GA Business Licensing & Operations: Adult Entertainment (2026)

Section 90-138 confines what it calls 'adult uses,' meaning adult bookstores, adult entertainment establishments, and adult theaters, to the C-2 and C-3 commercial zoning districts, and layers four location bans on top of that zoning limit. An adult use cannot sit within 500 feet of the lot line of a private residential dwelling, within 500 feet of a public library's lot line, or within 500 feet of a church, synagogue, shrine, chapel, mortuary, or other place used for religious services. The buffer widens to 1,000 feet for any school or college campus, defined to include public, private, or church-supported schools teaching the subjects common to the state's schools and colleges, but excluding specialty schools that teach only law, stenography, business, music, art, vocational, or other special subjects.

The distances run in every direction from the closest point on the adult use's lot line to the closest point on the other property's lot line, measured in a straight line. An applicant must have a state-registered land surveyor verify those distances on a plat, and that plat has to accompany the special exception application before the county will act on it. The section is careful to note what it does not do: it doesn't authorize or legalize selling, lending, renting, leasing, giving, advertising, publishing, or otherwise disseminating obscene material, and it doesn't authorize or legalize prostitution, sodomy, solicitation for sodomy, masturbation for hire, or distributing obscene material, all of which remain governed by separate state law.