Agenda - Planning Commission - 05/06/1997

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I I I I I I I ! I I I I I I I I TREE FARM Dave Hansen 2079 Dudley Ave. St. Paul, MN 55108 644-3927 Mark Hansen 2334 Carter Ave. St. Paul, MN 55108 644-2561 March 29. 1997 Neighbors of Hansen Tree Farm, Sorry we missed you. We stopped by to talk about our plans for Hansen Tree Farm. In a while you should be getting a notice from the city, informing you of our application for a Special Use Permit for our property and giving you the opportunity for input. We hope this letter will help explain what this Special Use Permit is all about. If you have any questions give either of us a call. We would like to begin by assuring you that we have no plans to use or properly for anything other than a Christmas tree farm. We are both are in our 40's and have other full time jobs. Growing Christmas trees is a hobby/part time job that we both enjoy. We have been planting 2,000-3,000 trees every year for the past 15 years and have no plans for the property other than to raise trees. Our business has increased gradually over the years and we now are selling over 900 trees a year. The land we now have in Christmas trees (about half of our 40 acres) is capable of supplying 1500-2000 trees a year. We have no plans to expand our operation beyond that. We want to keep the areas we now have in large pines as forest, and grow Christmas trees on the rest. Perhaps in a future generation it will make a nice park. You may or may not realize that we have never had any building on the land. This summer we'd like to build a pole barn. We need the barn to store our tractor, tree equipment and tools. We also would use part of building as a sales area during the Christmas season and as a place for us to get in out of the cold (we must be feeling our ageD. If future sales continue to increase we would like to build a separate sales office. The enclosed map shows where these buildings would be located. As part of this construction we would shift our main entrance off 155th from its present location at the NE comer of the property, to the middle of the property straight across from Traprock. The city and we believe this alignment would be best. The pole barn building, and later the sales office would be around the existing opening in the older pines. The reason for the Special Use Permit and public hearing relates to the fact that we do not have a residence on the property. The property is currently zoned residential, and the construction of any building not associated with a residence requires a Special Use Permit. We have included our plans for the property on this permit application (the pole barn and the sales room) to avoid any misunderstanding in the future of what we would like to do. Our permit application clearly states these building are tO be used only for storage and seasonal (Thanksgiving to Christmas) sales. The reason we are applying for both buildings now - though only the pole barn would be constructed this year - is to save money on the Conditional Use Permit process.