Billboard company owes millions and faces foreclosures. Founder says new projects are still coming in Philadelphia and New York.

In 2017, as Quakertown officials were puzzling how to get attention to the historic town in Upper Bucks County, Thaddeus Bartkowski of Catalyst Outdoor Advertising LLC pitched Scott McElree, Quakertown’s borough manager and police chief, to let his firm develop a 37-foot-tall crossroads sign topped with a glass compass face and lined with three round digital billboards to flash changing ads, day and night.

Bartkowski called it the Quakertown Compass Monument. He offered free advertising for borough and community groups.

“There were people that liked the idea. There were people who criticized it,” as if it would be an eyesore, McElree recalled.

The neighboring shopping center sued unsuccessfully to block the project; the towering sign was built in 2018. Despite the original “knee-jerk reaction,” McElree concluded, people now “kind of like it.”

McElree said he was surprised to learn that Meridian Bank on July 1 filed court papers to force a Bucks County sheriff’s sale of the Quakertown Compass Monument to pay part of the $23 million the bank has said was overdue in loan payments, interest, and costs from Quakertown and other Catalyst projects Meridian financed since the late 2010s.

The bank had already forced sales of Catalyst projects on I-95 in Center City and in Langhorne to get back part of that money and will pursue “all remedies” to get the rest, said bank president Chris Annas.

In New Jersey, investor W.P. Carey Inc. has forced the scheduled July 11 auction of nine other Catalyst projects — some complete, some not yet built, others containing unfinished or neglected amenities such as a dried-up pond and green wall in Pennsauken, and an incomplete ambulance station in Mount Laurel.

Bartkowski started Catalyst in 2009, pursuing a lucrative economic strategy: Catalyst could spend $1 million or more to design a billboard, add features to disarm potential community opposition, and push litigation to win town approvals. Catalyst would raise financing from banks like Meridian or real estate investors like W.P. Carey, then sell the operations and decades of future ad fees for millions to the big national billboard companies, earning fat profits.

By 2020, Catalyst employed more than 30 people, including ad sales staff. Enhancing his proposals with “living walls” of greenery, fountains, even municipal amenities such as parks and public facilities, Bartkowski won recognition as a digital advertising pioneer and made plans to expand across the U.S.

But payments slowed, construction on some projects stalled, and litigation mounted, including foreclosures that blocked Catalyst from profitable sales. Bartkowski cited the 2020 COVID shutdowns and a dip in billboard demand for the slowdown.

In a lawsuit and in interviews, Bartkowski’s former co-owners and top officers have offered a different explanation, blaming the founder’s free-spending lifestyle for costing the company millions that might have been better spent paying its bills.

Bartkowski, in an interview with The Inquirer, remained confident. He said his company, forced from its Newtown Square offices and streamlined into a smaller development team, is working on new projects in the New York area as well as Philadelphia and its suburbs.

Bartkowski said history has already rewarded his approach. ”Nobody had seen a monument sign,” with digital billboards and town names embedded in a wall at a major intersection, before Catalyst began promoting and building them in the early 2010s, he said. “We fundamentally changed what an outdoor ad is — a sign that looks like the community.”

Here’s what participants said happened when Catalyst came to their towns.

In 2010, Bartkowski began a series of marketing campaigns to erect digital billboards in Delaware County townships. Dismayed leaders in half a dozen townships where residents loudly opposed billboards spent $300,000-plus fighting Catalyst projects over the next two years, according to a Delaware County Daily Times report.

Concord Township spent $40,000 fighting Catalyst’s initial proposals. “This was a big project for us that many did not initially support,” said Kevin O’Donoghue, a member of the town’s governing board from 2004 to 2020.

Catalyst offered to drop plans for other billboards in the township if officials agreed to a single attention-grabbing “monument,” with stone-wall-mounted digital ad screens, the Concord name prominently displayed, a pond, and fountains, near a former Wawa in the island between the northbound and southbound lanes of U.S. Route 202, the busy road connecting West Chester to Wilmington.

According to Bartkowski, Concord’s resistance eased after nearby Westtown Township agreed to a well-landscaped digital sign wall, farther north on 202, passed by flocks of daily commuters and by visitors to busy West Chester University.

O’Donoghue, an IT consultant and father of eight who is active in township sports leagues, said he was also impressed by Bartkowski’s offer of free advertising to community groups and sports leagues.

O’Donoghue is pleased with the result: “After it was completed, we received amazing positive community feedback. Catalyst took an eyesore, practically unbuildable piece of property in the middle of our commercial corridor, and created a first-class custom communication platform.”

Near the center of East Whiteland Township, a pair of billboards developed by Catalyst after years of negotiations tower over Route 202 near the state Route 401 (Conestoga Road) crossing. The operation was acquired from Catalyst by the national billboard operator Outfront after its installation in 2022, one of the sales that was supposed to propel Catalyst profits and fund expansion.

But these billboards, unlike other Catalyst signs nearby, remain dark. “It’s what Thaddeus Bartkowski calls ‘giant iPhone screens,’ but it’s not operating,” East Whiteland Township Manager Steve Brown said.

After acquiring the billboards, Outfront found it needed to cut more trees if the signs were to be visible from the highway. East Whiteland officials objected. State officials turned down the tree-cutting request.

“Catalyst represented that only so many trees would be cleared, and we’ve been holding [Outfront] to that,” Brown said. “We don’t want more trees removed.” An Outfront attorney declined to comment.

“Green walls” that Catalyst built in West Conshohocken and Pennsauken, promising a contrast to sterile billboards, have faded. Such walls require careful design and regular maintenance, town officials and Bartkowski acknowledged in interviews. But the plants on both have died and fallen.

George Irwin, owner of Cherry Hill-based Living Wall, whose wall-based plant systems have been adopted by Longwood Gardens and other clients, warns that green-wall sponsors and developers too often fail to budget or follow through with the work needed to keep outdoor structures evergreen, especially in climates subject to extremes of heat, rainfall, and humidity, as in the Philadelphia area. The result: They have browned into “eyesores,” he said.

Litigation, debt, and delay have been hard on the formerly green walls. Catalyst had plans to sell the West Conshohocken sign and pay Meridian, but two years of litigation over easement payments on the property have kept the sale from going through, according to Bartkowski.

The Pennsauken sign is among those to be auctioned Thursday to pay Catalyst debt to investor W.P. Carey; Mayor Marco DiBattista hopes a new owner will fix the dead walls and dry ponds, ending years of “empty promises.”

More recent Catalyst installations, such as new digital advertising walls in Maple Shade and Raritan, N.J., don’t feature the green-wall strategy.

The Pennsylvania Convention Center has been trying to install Catalyst digital billboards for more than a decade under a city program called Urban Experiential Display.

“It’s art meets advertising in high-end installations designed to carry your message in a way that’s not going to be an eyesore,” said John McNichol, who runs the Convention Center authority.

City Council and Mayor Jim Kenney approved early proposals, but the pandemic shutdowns stalled plans, according to McNichol.

The current proposal calls for building a sign at Broad and Race Streets near the Convention Center’s main entrance, plus a freestanding, “monument-type billboard” on land the center acquired in recent years at Seventh and Callowhill Streets near Chinatown, McNichol said. Such busy locations near I-676 and Center City could command multimillion-dollar prices from national billboard companies once they are ready for ads.

As a state authority, McNichol said the Convention Center could probably build the billboards without needing City Council’s agreement. But billboard operators typically want multi-decade contracts, and the authority has permission to operate the center only until 2039, he added.

“We’re trying to get approval in Harrisburg to extend our operating agreement,” McNichol said. A long-term deal would reassure the buyer of Catalyst’s digital billboards of supportive site management for decades to come, and “that would increase their revenues significantly.” He added that the Convention Center hopes to get a share of those revenues, too.

McNichol hopes the General Assembly will approve a longer contract with his authority, making the Catalyst displays more lucrative. “We want to get it done,” he added. ”Thaddeus has been good to work with.”

Tredyffrin Township, the most populous community in Chester County, defeated Catalyst’s billboard plan. Earlier this year, the state Supreme Court upheld an appeals court ruling that the town had the right to refuse the company’s planned Paoli “clock tower” on the narrow site of a onetime Lancaster Pike tollhouse along U.S. 30 near the Route 252 underpass and beside the busy Amtrak-SEPTA rail line.

“Residents didn’t want it. They thought it was an eyesore and a safety concern,” said Gabrielle Ignari, the township spokesperson. The zoning and planning boards also rejected the proposal. “They agreed it was an unsafe eyesore.” She said Tredyffrin spent over $60,000 fighting it, plus “hundreds of hours” of work by the township solicitor’s office.

Lower Merion officials have resisted Catalyst’s early attempts to put a 50-foot billboard above the Schuylkill Expressway on township-owned woods.

That proposal grew from a long-running effort by Catalyst to build two billboards in neighboring Haverford Township that would be visible to Lancaster Avenue motorists in both Main Line communities, according to Lower Merion Manager Ernie McNeely. The townships’ parallel resistance led to a 2020 court case and appeal that has not been resolved, as they continue to negotiate with Bartkowski.

“My residents in Gladwyne are adamantly against this billboard,” said Joshua L. Grimes, a Lower Merion commissioner. “I don’t want them in Gladwyne. I don’t want them on Lancaster Avenue. They are proposing to build this in an area along I-76 and the Schuylkill, Belmont Avenue to West Conshohocken, where there are no billboards. Now, drivers enjoy a relatively uncluttered drive among the foliage and the PennDot signs. There are many concerns raised about distraction,” including complaints by volunteer first responders.

Grimes said the many financial and legal claims against Catalyst raise questions about whether any agreement between a township and the company can be enforced.

“Billboard companies are very aggressive with litigation,” he said. If Catalyst doesn’t have the money to pay judgments against it, communities could have little leverage to see their agreements enforced.

Bartkowski said he is accustomed to opposition. “The inherent process of getting land use approvals attracts its own public attention,” he said, and Catalyst’s pioneering use of digital media in its projects attracted extra attention.

The Philadelphia and New York areas still have thousands of likely sites for modern digital outdoor advertising facilities, Bartkowski added.

“We created this,” he said. “We’ve been at this a long time, and land development moves very slowly.”