(FORTUNE Magazine) – A NEW MOVEMENT to restrict outdoor advertising has reached Washington. Vermont, Maine, and Hawaii have long banned billboards. At least half a dozen cities have cracked down since Houston, forested with 7,000 of the big signs, passed a stern ordinance in 1980 prohibiting new ones. In April the Reagan Administration endorsed a bill by Senator Slade Gorton, a Washington ! Republican, that would gradually remove billboards along interstate and other federal highways. Says a worried outdoor advertising executive: ''A lot of people are taking shots at us right now.'' Lady Bird Johnson, in the last big federal barrage against billboards in the Sixties, won only a partial victory. Environmentalists at first wanted to outlaw new signs along federal highways and phase out existing ones without compensating owners. So potent was the billboard lobby, however, that the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 required the federal and state governments to pay for sign removal. To date the outdoor advertising industry has received more than $200 million, mostly from Washington. Faster than the old signs have come down, the industry has put up new and bigger ones. Reason: The act allows billboards in commercial and industrial areas, a loophole that has been interpreted so loosely that signs can go up almost anywhere. The billboard industry's annual revenues have nearly doubled in six years, to an estimated $1.3 billion. Groups like the Coalition for Scenic Beauty and the National Taxpayers Union, a lobbying arm for fiscal conservatives, think they may muster the votes on Capitol Hill to knock out the reimbursement provision. The Highway Beautification Act ''is the only federal law we know of that pays polluters to stop polluting,'' says Jill Lancelot, director of congressional affairs at the Taxpayers Union. The Gorton bill would tighten the definition of commercial areas. Many signs outside the new boundaries would have to come down in five years -- their depreciable life under federal tax rules -- without compensation. The industry will be no pushover in the coming showdown. The Outdoor Advertising Association of America, a trade group, distributed more than $45,000 in honorariums to members of Congress last year, mostly for personal appearances; the association ranked tenth among trade groups handing out these goodies. One company alone, Ackerley Communications of Seattle, disbursed an additional $42,000. Jim McLaughlin, managing partner of Turner Outdoor Advertising, an Atlanta outfit that used to belong to broadcasting magnate Ted Turner, says he detects hypocrisy in the attacks on his industry. ''A politician complains that we put up ugly signs,'' explains McLaughlin. ''But when he's running for office, we're the first place he calls for advertising space.'' In late July the billboard fighters will try to attach their bill to a highway authorization measure now before the Senate Environment Committee. They have a better-than-even chance in the Senate but face a bloody battle in the House.