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Behind Springfield Underground CEO Louis Griesemer is a few million square feet of undeveloped space.
Behind Springfield Underground CEO Louis Griesemer is a few million square feet of undeveloped space.

A Hard Rock Life

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Nearly 70 years and 31 million tons of Burlington formation limestone. That was the life expectancy of mining operations at Springfield Underground Inc.

“It’s a finite resource and when it’s gone, it’s gone,” said Louis Griesemer, president and CEO of the company that manages some 2.4 million square feet of warehouse and data storage underneath the surface in northeast Springfield.

This month, Springfield Underground crews will cease mining and shift focus to developing 3.6 million square feet where limestone has been cleared out for prospective tenants.

“Even though it took us 69 years to get there, every deposit has a life,” Griesemer said.

The family-owned company began mining work in 1946 at an open pit quarry, now the north entrance to Springfield Underground’s 6 million square feet below the earth’s surface. Griesemer said over a dozen fully occupy the developed space for roughly four stories of warehousing, document and food storage, and a data center.

“We’ve been planning as if there were a small city to be built down here,” Griesemer said of the roads, utility corridors and drainage systems carved out during decades of mineral extraction.

Underground leases began in 1960. The client with the biggest footprint – Kraft Foods Group Inc. – arrived in 1962, and the secondary market of real estate development began to grow as viable business opportunity.

Like a city, Springfield Underground has a rail line – for receiving Kraft freight on a nightly basis from New Mexico – and a five-man maintenance crew for scrubbing the streets, washing support pillars and changing light bulbs, some 40 feet off the ground. Big rigs are everywhere.

“Our biggest problem right now is on a busy morning, our trucks back up,” Griesemer said.

The next mine over
Springfield Underground only extracts rock to the limits of company property, and with another operation – Westside Stone LLC – mining on the other side of town, purchase of adjoining properties wasn’t pursued.

“We probably would have run out sooner if the economy hadn’t slumped in 2007,” Griesemer said of the eastern mine. “Since then, real estate has been our dominant growth area.”

Griesemer declined to disclose company revenue, but estimated it at less than $20 million last year. He said mining and real estate contributed evenly to the financials until the economic downturn. In recent years, real estate makes up about 66 percent of business.

“We’re going to lose this market,” Griesemer said of the mine’s construction materials and agricultural lime products.

Customers including Kay Concrete Materials Co., area ready-mix cement companies, local MFA Inc. farm supply stores and such contractors as Hartman & Co. will take local rock and agricultural lime orders to other east-side quarries.

“The whole rock business is really a transportation issue,” said Conco Cos. President Andrew Baird. “It’s how quickly you can get rock to where it needs to be.”

Without Springfield Underground mining, Baird anticipates increased business at Conco’s Galloway quarry in southeast Springfield.

“They’ve been kind of winding down for a while, so I imagine we’ve already picked up some of it,” Baird said.

“I think some of the other neighboring quarries will as well.”

Expanding underground
The focus on underground space for future tenants means Springfield Underground is banking on inherent strengths, which Griesemer considers to be stable and energy-efficient structures. The closest competitors – a 2.8 million-square-foot underground facility owned by Americold Logistics LLC and the 2.1 million-square-foot Ozark Terminal Inc. – are an hour’s drive away in Carthage and Neosho, respectively.

“There’ s a lot of industrial real estate on the market that’s being developed, but ours is kind of specialized,” Griesemer said. “We probably have the majority of the cold space in Springfield.”

While the average temperature hovers at 60 F year-round, some food companies require additional refrigeration from aboveground facilities. One such company is Springfield Underground-owned Cold Zone Inc., which uses roughly 75 percent of its 200,000-square-foot space for deep freeze.

The company is marketing 90,000 square feet soon to be completed. Also, the data center operated by Bluebird Network LLC is undergoing expansion to more than double the server space to nearly 30,000 square feet.

Griesemer said technological innovations, dwindling resources and a slowdown in the construction industry phased out the focus on mining over time. When he started working full time at Springfield Underground in 1977, the mining division employed 24 people.

With computer-controlled equipment now handling most of the work and fewer rock faces to drill, blast and excavate, the current crew numbers seven. Some workers will transfer over to developing cleared space after Sept. 25.

As for the equipment at Springfield Underground, most will be sold and Griesemer said the company intends to invest in newer technology for Westside’s mine. He said the company is still waiting for construction industry demand to pick up before Westside is producing full time. With 500 continuous acres of property above ground compared to Springfield Underground’s 600, he estimates that space, once developed, would be comparable to its eastern sibling.

That would give the company some 12 million square feet of real estate below ground – roughly one-fifth the size of Kansas City’s SubTropolis, advertised as the world’s largest underground facility by owner and real estate development company Hunt Midwest.

“It will be several years before we have space for any kind of development, but that’s our hope,” Griesemer said.

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