See this post on thise website titled Update From North Ardmore RE: Exxon Issue

and an article in the paper where Fritsch is crying poor....HMMM maybe if he hadn't overcharged for gasoline since day one of this stupid gas station, he wouldn't have such problems? Is it OUR problem as residents that a gas station can't make enough money? Mebbe Fristch should be griping at BIG OIL? This carwash and mini mart is NOT needed. As consumers we are paying MORE THAN ENOUGH for gasoline. Fritsch's "gross sales" are not our problem. And it is bunk that he can lower gas prices if he has a car wash - look at the Sunoco Car Wash and Gas Station opposite the Mariott West in Conshohocken. It's gas prices are still high, and it has a cheap underutilized car wash.

Here is the article:

Car wash plans now in the hands of Lower Merion board
By Cheryl Allison

In its peak years, Robert Fritsch's gas station on Montgomery Avenue in Ardmore was pumping 220, 000 gallons of gas per month. Now that number is down to 70, 000 gallons.At the same time, the service and repair portion of the business has dried up.

Unless he can build the business up again by adding a car wash and expanded convenience store, he told Lower Merion's zoning board last week, the site will soon be just "a boarded-up gas station like so many others."

More than a year after the application was filed, and after four hearings taken up with technical testimony on everything from traffic to noise to air pollution, Fritsch finally had his say.

But so did neighbors in North Ardmore, who have consistently turned out to fight the proposal. They say adding more intensive uses to the site, around the corner from the Ardmore Wawa and just feet from a narrow railroad underpass on Woodside Avenue, is not just redundant but risky.

"We're taking a bad situation and making it extremely dangerous, " said spokesman Richard Sheridan. "The choice comes down to, should we trade off what we have in Lower Merion in order to allow Mr. Fritsch to make additional profits? I hope not."

A decision in the long-running case will necessarily rest on legal issues and that tedious technical testimony, but those are the conflicting points of view that zoning board members will also be weighing over the next several weeks. With the record set to be closed in a few days after filing of some final legal briefs, they said they would announce their vote at a meeting July 24.

Fristsch has operated the station, a non-conforming use in the area's residential zone, at the busy intersection of Montgomery and Woodside avenues since 1969. Under township code, an expansion of a non-conforming use by 25 percent can be approved by special exception, and that is what the gas station property's owners have requested.

They propose to remove two of the 10 fueling islands, eliminate the service bays, expand the station's convenience retail space and install a one-bay car wash to the rear of the building, adjacent to R5 line railroad tracks.

In the past 15 years, Fritsch said, the industry has changed, so that "repair business has gone away."

"We need the gross sales to make it work. It's an expensive piece of real estate, " he told the board, acknowledging that pricing for gas there "is not the best."