Clay, NY Business Licensing & Operations: Adult Entertainment (2026)

Chapter 68, Adult Uses, adopted by the Town Board on September 18, 2006 by L.L. No. 9-2006, defines a long list of adult use establishments in Section 68-3, including adult arcades, adult bookstores and video stores, adult cabarets, adult motels, adult motion-picture theaters, adult theaters, escorts and escort agencies, nude model studios, massage parlors, and sexual encounter centers. Section 68-4 makes an adult use establishment a permitted use in any nonresidential zoning district, but only if the location and spacing rules are met. No adult use may sit within 1,000 feet of a church, synagogue or regular place of worship, a public or private preschool, elementary or secondary school, a licensed child day-care center, the boundary of any residential zoning district, a public park, an adjacent municipality, or another adult use, and none may share a lot or building with another adult use.

A separate 1,000-foot buffer applies to the Clay Industrial Park, and a 500-foot buffer applies to any County road inside the Woodard Industrial Park. Section 68-4G measures every buffer in a straight line from the nearest exterior wall of the adult use structure, ignoring intervening buildings, and Section 68-4H applies the same measurement from the nearest interior or exterior wall when the adult use sits inside a shopping center or enclosed mall. Every adult use must operate inside an enclosed building with no exterior visual display of specified sexual activity or specified anatomical areas.

An adult use lawfully operating before the chapter's effective date that no longer meets the spacing rules becomes a nonconforming use under Section 230-23 rather than an illegal one, and later development near a lawful adult use does not retroactively make it nonconforming.