Business Member Highlight: Ground Zero Services

Ground Zero Services, based in Courtland, Minn. near New Ulm, is a paving and excavating contractor that was founded in 1999 by Jason and Jennifer Kuester. At the time, the company had just one skidloader and a pickup truck with plow, sweeper and parking lot striper. Ground Zero Services is still a family-owned and family-operated company, but it has now grown into a major contractor capable of building roads, parking lots, trails and trail heads, and virtually any other site development project.

One of the signature projects completed by Ground Zero Services was the removal and reconstruction of a 3.2-mile trail system in Alexander Ramsey Park in Redwood Falls. The trails in the park, which follow the hilly, ravine-filled terrain along the Redwood River, were paved decades ago with asphalt and badly deteriorated. Using a paving machine designed and built by Jason and his shop crew, the trails were repaved with 4-inch-thick, poured in place concrete.

Ground Zero Services now has three concrete paving machines capable of paving concrete trails 7,8 and 10 feet in width. It also has asphalt paving equipment for trails and parking lots.

Much of the Ramsey Park trail system could not be accessed by the full-sized trucks needed to remove the old asphalt paving debris or cement trucks needed to rebuild the trails. Once again, company owner Jason designed a system using a skid steer machine to pull his unique paving machine along the hilly and curvy trail system and a system of using track utility buggies to transfer the concrete mix from trucks in the parking lots to the paving site.

Ground Zero Services not only removed the old paved trail surfaces and installed the new concrete trails in Ramsey Park, they performed all necessary excavation work and even installed the new trail edge soil and replacement grass that now edges the trails. All of the work at Ramsey Park was completed during the extremely rainy and very challenging summer of 2017.

The Ramsey Park trails project demonstrates that Ground Zero Services performs high quality work and can handle and complete the most complex project. Ground Zero Services has built trail systems in parks, on hospital campuses and in municipalities across Minnesota, and can handle similar projects in your park system.

Ground Zero Services specializes in moving dirt on all types of projects  wet or dry, and has the ability to work in environmentally sensitive areas. It also constructs retention ponds, ditch projects and roads.

For more information, contact Jason at Ground Zero at 507-354-3973, jason@groundzeromidwest.com or visit their website at www.groundzeromidwest.com.

GMPT is proud to have several businesses and corporations among our more than 120 members. We periodically feature articles on our business members in our monthly newsletter so that our readers can learn about the businesses that support our organization. You can see the full list of our business members on the Business Resources page on our website. If you know of any businesses that might be interested in joining GMPT, please refer them to our Business Membership Form.