The Bangor City Council tonight will consider limiting nude-dancing establishments through regulation or ban them altogether. The choice is clear, the council should do both.

It should do both because even in banning these operations, the council has discussed allowing a phase-out period in which the business owners can recoup some of their investments. The phase-out time suggested during the council’s municipal operations committee last week was one year, with the possibility of adding a second year if the business demonstrates a financial hardship.

Fair enough. The businesses were legal when they were opened and their owners might expect some return on their investments. But city councilors should also ask how many other businesses are being harmed or are staying away because of their nude neighbors. Further, the possibility that the city will be host to nude dancing for as long as two more years means that Bangor needs to increase the rules governing this activity. The operations committee came up with several useful ideas.

First, the committee suggested a minimum age for dancers and patrons. Right now, any girl old enough to work at the local grocery store is old enough under the law to dance naked for the panting masses. The committe recommended raising the age to 18 for both the employees and customers. That’s a good start.

It further suggests prohibiting any new establishments from opening near churches, schools or near places that sell alcohol. This makes sense, although given the increase in broken beer bottles along the sidewalks near a couple of these places, even in the absence of nearby alcohol sales, it is difficult to see how this last restriction is going to help much. The committee also recommended restricting dancing to topless nudity. This may be a matter of the council measuring morality by degrees of undress, but otherwise is a distinction likely to be lost as easily as a G-string during a lap dance.

The committee has another half-dozen proposals, but all have the same underlying ideas: Keep these establishments away from kids and other businesses and draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. This is the right direction for the city to take. And if Bangor keeps going in this direction, its destination is obvious — to push these establishments beyond city limits.