Zoning Board Denies Billboard Challenge Application

The next step may be county court for a company hoping to erect electronic billboards along Nutt Road in Phoenixville.

In front of a modest crowd Wednesday evening, the borough’s zoning hearing board denied the application for a substantive validity challenge from Chester County Outdoor. The company currently has leases with three Phoenixville businesses to erect V-shaped electronic billboards standing 12 feet tall and 41 feet wide, with the total structures at 43 to 47 feet from the ground to the top of the sign.

Chester County Outdoor brought a substantive validity challenge, stating that Phoenixville’s zoning ordinance did not allow for “off-premises advertising and billboard signs.”

The 28-page ruling outlined the reasons for the denial, pointing out that the borough allows for freestanding signs in 12 of its zoning districts. The ordinance also defines “billboard” and “off-premises sign.” The ruling states that, according to the ordinance, freestanding signs do not have to be tied to the business at the property where they are located. Therefore, it permits off-premises signs, according to the ruling.

Chester County Outdoors’ arguments are based on semantics and wordplay with the borough’s existing ordinance, according to the ruling, and language has to be taken in context when it comes to zoning.

“A statute cannot be dissected into individual words, each one being thrown on an anvil of dialectics to be hammered into a meaning which has no association with words from which it has violently been separated,” the ruling states.

Phoenixville Borough Council sent legal representation to the hearings, and the borough presented as evidence two denied sign permit applications of Lamar Advertising. That company, as recently as December, proposed to put non-electronic billboards at 600 and 640 Nutt Road, and the borough denied the permit applications, but not because the zoning ordinance was exclusionary.

Rather, the borough argued that the Lamar application shows that other outdoor sign companies do not see the borough’s zoning ordinance as prohibitive when it comes to billboards.

Several times, the ruling mentions that Chester County Outdoor tried to pull its specific plans tied to the three sites, Sal’s Pizza Box, Monro Muffler and Brake/Sherwin Williams and Napa Auto Parts, from the application during the hearing process. The board denied Chester County Outdoor’s request to pull the site plans, which show two 492-square foot signs on each location.

The company itself chose to attach the plans originally and later requested that they be removed from the application. The ruling states that Chester County Outdoor’s desire to remove the site-specific plans was contradictory to statements included in an addendum to the application. 

“Specifically, CCO notes in the addendum to its application that ‘as the successful challenger to the substantive validity of the ordinance, CCO is entitled to construct, operate and maintain billboards on the properties as proposed in the plans,’” the ruling states.

One member of the zoning board, John Horenci, was absent at Wednesday's meeting, when Chairman Daniel Dvorak read excerpts from the ruling and announced the decision to deny the application.

The billboard issue will likely move on to court, as Chester County Outdoor has in the past stated plans to pursue an appeal in the Chester County Court of Common Pleas if the board denied the application. No representatives from the company were present at Wednesday’s hearing. Several residents who had been granted party status for the hearing were in attendance.

“It’s to be anticipated that there may be an appeal,” said Allen Greenwood, solicitor for the zoning hearing board.