While Ross puts its "McKnightmare" days behind it, and Moon is making visits to its surface less forbidding, Monroeville seems to be marching in the other direction. Suburban blight and visual litter? Monroeville says, bring it on.

These older municipalities began their rapid growth in America's post-war boom, when, apparently, any and all development was welcome. The suburbs were capitalism's Wild West back then, with little or no regulation to control density, sprawl or aesthetics. Every entrepreneur was a law unto himself.

The result is something most of us now consider downright ugly. Monroeville's Miracle Mile, for instance, is a miracle-free mess.

In the crowded field of competitors in the suburban blight sweepstakes, the frontrunner is the ubiquitous billboard. "Visual pollution," "sky trash" and, my personal favorite, "litter on a stick" are the apt terms billboard critics use for something most municipalities are trying to squelch.

Two years ago, Moon supervisors adopted a zoning master plan for their main drag that essentially prohibits new billboards.

Ross officials adopted a "very extensive billboard ordinance" this year to limit their presence in a community that already has plenty, solicitor Donald Gates said.

Ross planners established distance requirements that effectively prohibit more signs on the visually saturated McKnight Road. But township commissioners are embroiled in conflict with Heffner Outdoor Advertising over two signs the company wants to erect near The Shoppes at Northway.

The Pine-based company has been seeking approval for these McKnight Road signs for two years, so its application was filed long before the ordinance was adopted and is exempt from its provisions.

Heffner "did meet all the conditions recommended by the planning commission, but when [the matter] came before the commissioners, who have the ultimate responsibility," Mr. Gates said, "they imposed another condition: That he has the consent of the neighbors."

The neighbors, the owner and tenants of the adjacent, struggling Andre Plaza, contend that billboards blocking their signs and visibility would hurt their business.

"Since they vehemently objected," Mr. Gates said, "the board of commissioners turned it down."

Heffner's appeal to Common Pleas Court will hinge on whether the commissioners can, in effect, impose this condition.

In Monroeville, it's also the neighbors who object to proposed billboards, but the commissioners there seem eager to ignore citizens' protests and their own planning board's recommendations. They are poised to adopt an ordinance, drafted by the attorney for a New Jersey billboard company, that would override their own zoning ordinances in a special "overlay district" and allow massive billboards on an uncluttered strip of the Parkway East and Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Monroeville citizens have kept up their opposition to this sly, anti-democratic maneuvering for two years. They've had to: The drama has had more twists than the turnpike. Monroeville's planning commission twice rejected Interstate Outdoor Advertising's requests, but council twice overrode the planning commission's recommendations and eventually passed the ordinance in January 2006.

Conflicts with state and federal laws were found, and the mayor vetoed the ordinance, so council began entertaining a revised version. But they've managed to postpone a vote on the matter for several months in a row, ostensibly at the request of the billboard company. Delaying the vote until after the spring primaries seemed suspiciously convenient for pro-billboard commissioners.

This conflict is an affront to our ideals of self-governance and community. It's also a bizarre instance of a capitalist venture defying market trends: Consumers don't like the visual assaults and traffic frustrations of older commercial districts such as Ross, Moon and Monroeville.

In Ross, officials are proud of their slow-but-steady effort to "retrofit" the commercial district with modern aesthetics. "McKnight was not very attractively developed," Mr. Gates said. "We're really trying to make it look better" with, for instance, new requirements on landscaping and lighting, even around the bases of billboards.

"I thought when Nordstrom said they were coming to the [Ross Park] mall, that spoke volumes." He's right; the elite retailer's choice was a recognition of market trends that Monroeville would do well to consider.

Capitalism is supposed to be enlightened self-interest, but Monroeville's leaders are bending over backward to accommodate selfish, unenlightened, throwback capitalism. As in Ross, an outside company seeks to make money by altering the landscape of a community its owners don't live in or have to put up with.

But while Ross commissioners are risking a legal battle to protect the community's clear wishes, Monroeville commissioners seem intent on ignoring the opposition and forcing this upon their own community. Voters should commit themselves to protesting and to remembering for as long as it takes for their government to reflect their will.