Not surprisingly, residents are in high dudgeon. The billboards, they say, would be a visual blight and a dangerous distraction for drivers.
The town is gearing up for what promises to be a long and costly fight likely to land in Chester County Court.
For the billboard purveyor with a novel strategy for placing outdoor ads, courtrooms are familiar battlegrounds.
In tonier Pennsylvania suburbs in particular, Bartkowski has tried to erect billboards by mounting legal challenges to municipal zoning codes.
He has used as ammunition Pennsylvania Supreme Court rulings dating to the 1960s that outlaw "exclusionary zoning," typically in regard to low- and moderate-income housing. Municipalities may not restrict development in ways that keep out specific classes of people or kinds of businesses.
Bartkowski argues that billboards are covered under those decisions, and that local zoning codes that prohibit - or do not explicitly permit - them are unconstitutional.
"We should be given the same opportunity" as other businesses to operate, he said in an interview last week.
"We're going to pursue whatever recourse we have."
Bartkowski has been in the outdoor-advertising business in the region for more than a decade. In 2001, he was involved in a wall wrap - a Philly.com banner on Suburban Station - declared illegal by the city Department of Licenses and Inspections. (Philly.com no longer uses a Bartkowksi-controlled company for advertising.)
His march through the Pennsylvania suburbs has taken him to Abington, Springfield, Concord, and Haverford, to name a few locales. It began in 2008 in Marple Township, where he proposed putting up seven billboards along West Chester Pike and Sproul Road.
Marple tried to block him. Bartkowski turned to Delaware County Court.
