Last month, a federal district court in Pennsylvania found that a billboard company’s challenge to the constitutionality of the state’s highway advertising law sufficiently stated a claim for relief and could proceed to further stages of litigation.

Pennsylvania’s highway advertising law contains a general prohibition on sign structures within 500 feet of a highway interchange or rest area, but the law exempts on-premises commercial and noncommercial signs (i.e. those advertising activities and products available on the property where the sign is located) and “official signs,” which are defined as those placed by public agencies.

Adams Outdoor Advertising, a billboard company, brought a First Amendment challenge, claiming that PennDOT, the state’s transportation department, had changed its interpretation of the highway advertising law, and had given varying directives regarding whether the 500-foot restriction applied to billboards on the opposite side of a highway from a rest area or interchange. Adams wanted to install a billboard opposite an interchange, but PennDOT had declined to issue a permit.  Adams contended that PennDOT’s changed interpretation of the statute made it unconstitutionally vague.  Adams further alleged that the lack of any timeframes in which PennDOT was required to act upon applications for sign permits also made the law unconstitutional.

The court first determined that it was not clear whether the law in question was content neutral, due in part to the exceptions to the permitting requirement.  The court left for a later day the determination of whether it was content neutral, reasoning that even a content neutral law would be required to satisfy intermediate scrutiny.  The court dismissed Adams’s vagueness claim, however, because it found that a person of ordinary intelligence could determine the meaning of the law from its face; the court was not persuaded that PennDOT’s changing interpretation of the statute rendered the law vague.  The court went on to find, however, that because the law was not clearly content neutral on its face, the lack of any timeframe for the issuance of sign permits would potentially create a constitutional defect in the statute.

The court additionally dismissed substantive due process and equal protection claims as well.

Adams Outdoor Advertising Limited Partnership v. Penn. Dept. of Transp., No. 5:17-cv-01253, 2018 WL 822450 (E.D. Penn. Feb. 9, 2018).