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City Council December 01, 2014 City of Arden Hills 1245 West Highway 96 Arden Hills, MN 55112 Council Members, I am Tom Frattallone and I am writing concerning the site plan review request for our property at 1203 County Road E. As the new owners, Frattallone’s Hardware Inc. plans to repurpose the building to house our offices, which are currently located in our retail store on Lexington Ave. As you are aware we are one of the oldest family owned businesses in the City of Arden Hills and wish to maintain our presence in the city. When we set out to find a spot to relocate our offices there were many opportunities open to us. Being a hardware company we were not looking for class A office space, and there is abundant class C space available throughout the Twin Cities. We looked at combining our offices with a mechanics shop/ warehouse in both Minneapolis and St. Paul, but decided that we wished to keep our staff in Arden Hills. We have at this time purchased a site in St. Paul for a combined mechanic shop, warehouse space, and retail store. We will not be using the County Road E site for retail or a mechanic shop. We believe that the use of this space will make us much more productive in our offices and in our store at Arden Plaza. We are planning to use roughly 12,000 square feet of the 41,000 square feet for office, computer-build, planning, document storage, and small group meeting rooms. We made these plans with low density in mind. We currently occupy 4000 square feet and need to make our offices and processes more functional; which this new space will accomplish. We request a reduction in the required number of parking spaces for this property. We plan to reuse the existing parking lot and are able to accommodate 26 parking spaces that meet city size requirements. We currently employ only 13 office staff; including all officers of the company. We do not anticipate growing our office staff beyond 25 in the foreseeable future. Some of our office staff is part time and some work remotely, so not all of these workers will be on site at the same time. We feel confident that the size of the current parking lot will be sufficient for our parking needs now and in the future. We also propose that the ancillary storage function at this site will have no effect on the number of parking spaces we need. We plan to store off-season items for our store operations. No trucks will stay on site and no shipping or warehouse employees will work out of this site. Shipments will arrive and leave seasonally using Frattallone’s trucks. Our driver will provide loading and unloading labor. Winter materials will be stored here all summer, and lawn and garden will be stored during the winter, so most of the year will have little or no freight traffic. This function will have no impact on employee density at this site.