Billboard king faces auction of nine New Jersey properties after defaulting on payments

Thaddeus Bartkowski has been a familiar figure to municipal leaders across the Philadelphia region and New Jersey since 2009. Lawyers and real estate professionals for his Catalyst group of sign companies have pushed plans for bright electronic billboards above busy roads in scores of townships and boroughs, often triumphing over objections from residents and small-business owners.

“He’s like no one else. He’s a very innovative guy, and he’ll spend 10 years on a project,” said Paul Gartland, executive vice president and Northeast regional manager for Louisiana-based Lamar Advertising, the largest U.S. billboard company, which purchased a string of Catalyst signs in 2017 and has considered buying more.

But a number of Catalyst projects have not performed as projected. On July 11, auctioneers will seek buyers for nine N.J. billboard sites — some finished, some in stalled stages of construction, some only planned — in Mount Laurel, Washington Township (Gloucester County), Pennsauken, Merchantville, and Flemington.

These digital sign sites were foreclosed by W.P. Carey Inc., a New York City-based, publicly traded real estate investment and finance company. Carey last year sued Bartkowski’s companies, which Carey says defaulted on $28 million it is owed, including $26 million guaranteed by Bartkowski personally. A court-approved receiver has listed the sites for sale to help pay the debt. The nine New Jersey billboard projects have attracted “substantial interest” from outdoor advertising businesses, with “almost 40 bidders” registered to review the sites in detail, said Joshua Olshin, managing partner at AuctionAdvisers, the New York firm conducting the auction.

“To say we’re disappointed would be an understatement,” said Marco DiBattista, mayor of Pennsauken, which in 2021 held opening ceremonies for a towering Catalyst sign featuring a “green wall” of plants, a pond, and fountains on busy Route 70, Marlton Pike.

The sign, now operated by Outfront, is still a digital billboard, advertising Jefferson Health, the Camden aquarium, Rita’s Water Ice, and other regional businesses in bright electronic color. But the pond is dry, the plants that covered the wall are dead, and pieces have fallen off — including Pennsauken’s name.

“They oversold it and under-delivered, by a million miles,” DiBattista said. “There’s been a lot of empty promises.”

“We’re very excited it’s going to auction,” he said. “We hope whoever gets it we can work with closely, getting something that’s simpler, not so concerning for maintenance.”

“Thad’s company may have gone to too many towns too quickly,” said George Morris, attorney for Mount Laurel, where three former Catalyst projects — including an empty, incomplete, two-story building that was to house an ambulance station on Route 73 near the New Jersey Turnpike — are among the properties to be auctioned.

Over the past 15 years, Lamar, which operates over 153,000 of the nation’s 337,000 total highway and street displays, and its two largest rivals — Outfront Media of New York and Texas-based ClearChannel Outdoor Holdings, each with over 40,000 signs — helped propel Catalyst’s growth by buying signs the firm developed, typically at a price of several million dollars each, according to data collected by Billboard Insider.

They range from 50-foot-high billboards to brick- and stone-fronted municipal “monuments” flashing commercial and public-service ads on multiple screens. The national companies expect to collect fees from advertisers, often totaling several hundred thousand dollars a year, rising over time.

As dozens of its signs went live during the 2010s and early 2020s — including the M-shaped Middletown Monument in Bucks County, a wall at the entrance to Concord Township, a 37-foot-tall multi-sign assembly in Quakertown, “living walls” near the Conshohocken exit on the Schuylkill Expressway — Bartkowski collected a million-dollar yearly base salary.

He was named an entrepreneur of the year by accounting firm Ernst & Young in 2019. His firm promised equity shares and cash bonuses for top aides, whose base pay topped $250,000 a year, according to court filings. Bartkowski held fancy parties at Center City’s Vue on 50 and the sprawling Gladwyne estate (featured in the Wall Street Journal) where he lives. The founder drew up plans to expand to other major markets.

Catalyst still has some big plans. Bartkowski said in an interview that he is negotiating with Lower Merion for a digital sign 50 feet above the Schuylkill Expressway, and Pennsylvania Convention Center leaders hope he’ll build signs at both ends of the sprawling Center City property. Both proposals are years in the making.

In other ways, Catalyst has retrenched. At its peak in 2020, the firm employed about 35 people. Today, having shed its ads sales group, Bartkowski said, the company has seven people focused on development.

The company has faced dozens of lawsuits, including actions from former partners, lenders, investors, contractors, and employees seeking payments. Catalyst in April left its Newtown Square headquarters after defaulting on $98,000 in rent. The Gladwyne mansion is for sale. There are no current plans for national expansion, Bartkowski said in the interview.

Bartkowski and some of his former top aides offer rival accounts of the path that stalled work at the New Jersey sites and led to the auction.

Bartkowski, who attended LaSalle prep and Villanova, said the COVID shutdowns of 2020 slowed billboard construction, and W.P. Carey wouldn’t agree to ease terms. “COVID meaningfully changed construction costs and supply chain timing” and put the developer under cost pressure, he said.

Some former Catalyst officials complain that Bartowski’s lifestyle, funded by the company, left Catalyst vulnerable to the slowdown.

“He lived with supreme lavishness, while shirking employees out of back pay, stiffing his business partners, and bilking the contractors,” said Eric Ascalon, a lawyer, who worked as vice president of community development at Catalyst from 2018-2020. Given cash flows, the crunch was “inevitable.”

Bartkowski had raised capital for earlier billboards through a partnership with PREIT, the Philadelphia-based retail-mall landlord. Catalyst also borrowed from area banks, including WSFS and Meridian. (Both later sued Catalyst in payment disputes. WSFS said it has since been paid. Meridian is in negotiations, according to Bartkowski.)

To speed expansion in the late 2010s, Bartkowski turned to W.P. Carey. Under their agreement, Carey would own billboard sites, and Catalyst would develop custom digital signs, then sell sign-related operations to Lamar, Outfront, ClearChannel or other buyers, collecting multiple times the cost of getting municipal permissions and building signs with attractive extra features.

But under the sudden financial pressures of COVID shutdowns, W.P. Carey proved inflexible, according to Bartkowski. He said he offered “creative solutions” such as extra collateral.

Instead, W.P. Carey sued, leading to the auction. A W.P. Carey spokesperson said the company would not comment on the litigation. Bartkowski said he won’t be surprised if the company buys properties in the auction, at favorable prices.

In a civil lawsuit, three of Bartkowski’s former minority partners — Patrick Wolfington, who was executive vice president; John Grabowski, chief financial officer; and Timothy Earle, a real estate executive — in 2021 accused Bartkowski of paying himself an extra $3 million, in addition to his $1 million yearly salary and “far in excess of what he was entitled” as both CEO and the company’s majority owner, from January 2020 through May 2021.

They detailed a string of Bartkowski’s personal expenses — private jet, yacht, and personal driver; horse pasture and dog trainer; and work on city and Shore homes, among others — that they said the company should not have paid. And they demanded a total of more than half a million dollars in back pay.

“It was the three executives who were out of line,” countered Bartkowski’s attorney, James Sargent. He said they used stolen company documents to build a rival business — the court has stopped them from competing in the Philadelphia area, at least for now — and collected “ill-gotten gains” greater than what they said Catalyst owed them. The case is scheduled for a trial in September in Chester County Common Pleas Court.

Mount Laurel is among the towns most affected by the slowdown at Catalyst.

In 2018, state officials had urged the Burlington County town to relocate a volunteer emergency medical service from a 40-year-old building, citing Mount Laurel’s need to comply with state open-space rules. “Like magic, Thad showed up within a week of us hearing” from state officials that the township needed a new facility, Morris said. “His timing was very good. He showed us this massive dog park he built up in Bucks County.

“We said, ‘How about an EMS facility?’”

Town leaders were encouraged by Catalyst projects nearby. “He had a project in Pennsauken at the old American Red Cross building on [Route 70] near Bishop Eustace Prep and another on [Route] 38 near Camden Catholic, right after the Admiral Wilson Boulevard split,” Morris said.

“We spent a year designing. They would build us a building and use the second floor for digital display. It was going to be a great benefit for the town — it would give the town the opportunity to advertise for the volunteers,” he said.

“Then construction started and stopped,” amid litigation by contractors who said they weren’t being paid. “And the excuses came in.”

Bartkowski “put a great team together,” said Mort O’Boyle, who worked for Catalyst in 2019-20 on the Mount Laurel and Pennsauken projects, along with others in nearby Maple Shade and Washington Township. But, he added in an interview, consultants and contractors were soon complaining they weren’t getting paid, and some have filed lawsuits. Without full maintenance, O’Boyle said, sites deteriorated: “None of them look good now.”

According to Morris, while the shell of Catalyst’s Mount Laurel sign-and-building complex is complete, “it is nowhere close to being ready to be an EMS building.”

In Mount Laurel as in Pennsauken, officials said they look forward to talking to new owners about fixing the all-too-visible Catalyst projects. “We hope the [buyer] will complete it and donate it to Mount Laurel EMS,” Morris said. “We hope we can move forward.”