Boulder Campus Staff Council Spotlight: Vince Aquino

Staff Council Spotlight is an initiative of the BCSC Awards and Staff Recognition Committee (BCSC/ASR). Contact Serena Leland, Boulder Campus Staff Council (BCSC) Representative, at serena.leland@colorado.edu with comments or if you have a person you would like to recommend for the Spotlight series.

I am the Lead Arborist for Facilities Operations for Facilities Management on Boulder's Main Campus. I started at CU in 1997 as a six-month temp, and then I extended, and then I was brought on full time. I think I’m going on my sixteenth year as a full time employee. I’m responsible for all of the trees in the General Fund areas on campus. By General Fund, I mean all the academic buildings and the common areas, a lot of the fields, the open areas on campus. I work with one other person directly, Joel Serafin. And we take on guys from the other crews.

We do care and maintenance, installations and removals for all the trees in those areas. We have about 4,000 trees. I’m from Chicago originally, and I came out here with my family in late grade school… my dad worked at CSU, he worked in biology as well, he worked in clinical pathology as a lab technician and that had a huge influence on my interest in biology and life science.

What kind of educational and professional background do you have? How does one end up being an arborist?

I’m probably not really the typical way. I don’t have a degree. I studied some forestry and a lot of ecosystem biology. I was always very interested in that stuff, but never finished a degree. And I was working in trucking and warehousing and that type of work from my teens until my early thirties. And that’s when I came on here and I just wanted to work outside so I got a job as a grounds keeper, and I always had a lot of interest in forestry and tree care. And I had a little bit of experience and background in it and as people saw that I had an aptitude for it and an interest in it, they encouraged it and I was able to get more training. I was able to pick up more skills, learn more techniques and go to conferences and workshops. And I was able to work with people from the outside, from the city and different people, and was able to learn quite a bit and I was eventually promoted into a Lead Arborist position here. I think I’ve worked hard to learn a lot of things and do a lot of things, but I kind of got lucky too, and I was in the right place at the right time.

What is your favorite kind of tree and why?

Oh boy. So, I guess, from a maintenance standpoint of trees that are around here, my favorite would be the Kentucky coffee tree. We have a handful of them on campus. They have really interesting bark texture and an unusual kind of serpentine, twisty canopy.

My two favorite ones are by the Engineering Center, on the northwest and southwest corner; there are really cool Kentucky coffee trees there. I like the Kentucky coffee tree a lot because it’s so interesting in all seasons. I’m a wintertime person, I like the way things look in the winter. I like the bark texture, I like the silhouette of the canopy when it’s out of leaf, plus it has a circular, serpentine, kind of swirling crown and canopy. It doesn’t have the typical kind of scaffold branches; it’s got these kinds of unusual twists and turns. I call it a haunted house kind of quality, trees that kind of look like a haunted house in the old monster movies. I like that a lot and I think it’s an underutilized tree. And it’s a great tree for Colorado. And it’s a tree that people don’t think of as a shade tree for their yard, but I think they should because it has a lot going for it. It’s a good tree. It’s hard to say which is my favorite tree on campus, but if you had to hold me to it, I’d say the Kentucky coffee tree.

My favorite trees altogether are the big guys on the west coast, like the giant Doug firs, the Port Orford cedars and the coastal redwoods. That stuff is pretty amazing. We actually planted a giant Sequoia on campus near Engineering. I’m hoping it will do pretty well, but we might not have the amount of water for it to get really big, but it’s growing fast and establishing. There was a spot there, and it was protected and out of the wind, and it won’t get vandalized there. Fingers crossed. It’s been there four or five years and it’s picking up steam.

What do you find inspiring or gratifying about your work at CU Boulder?

Well, I don’t want to sound too sappy…

Was that pun intended?

Oh no, I didn’t think of that! It was not intended. I don’t want to sound too corny, how about that? I really enjoy working outside and working with my hands, and I am really grateful to have this job because to me, it’s a great blend of intellectual and physical work. I get to work really hard, get dirty and tired, but I have to really think about what I’m doing. It’s cerebral, it’s artistic and it’s very interesting.

I’ve been a biology nerd since I was a little boy. I guess I take satisfaction and I really enjoy the fact that in twenty and fifty, one hundred, and even two hundred years, there are going to be trees on this campus that I planted. Not just me, but my co-workers too, our group… trees that our crew planted. We’re part of the heritage of the land and our work has a major impact on the landscape for decades, and maybe even centuries. If that doesn’t inspire you, then I don’t know what else would. Doing that is cool, and it’s not just me, it’s groups of us who do this. I’m part of this whole group that’s making an impact on the aesthetics of campus for decades, and that’s really inspiring.

If you had unlimited funds to do any kind of tree/arbor project on campus that you wanted, what would you do and why?

If we had the money and the land, and the labor resources, I would like us to have our own nursery or growing operation. We’ve gotten some really good products over the years, but it’s tough to get exactly what you want the way you want it, the size and condition that you want it, and the time of year that you want it. I think it would be really interesting and really great if we grew our own stock, from either very small trees or even from seed in some cases, and cultivated and created our own stock of material for replacement. We could take our time and do it the right way and get the root material right. We could cultivate them the proper way and improve our success rate on stuff long term. We do pretty well, and we have a high rate of success on our plantings, but a great deal of the problems we have could be eliminated if we had our own nursery and we ran our own operation. We wouldn’t just be at the mercy of whatever is out there, whatever came in that month or that year. We usually have a nice selection, but every once in a while there is something unusual that you would like. And so we could cultivate our own specimen trees and we could take scions off of our existing, historical trees that we want to preserve. We’re going to try and do that anyway, but with a nursery, we could do a lot of that type of thing and have legacy trees. I think if I had a giant staff of people and a lot of money and some good land that would be kind of a dream thing to do.

Why is your/your team’s work important and valuable for the campus?

We’ve seen studies that indicate that people decide if they’re going to go to a university in the first twenty minutes that they’re there. Students get out of the car and walk around and they’ve already decided, I‘m not coming here or I love it. And what they see, the minute they get out the door, is our turf; the condition of our hardscapes; our shrubs and our trees; that the trash is picked up; the place is swept up; the mulch is where it’s supposed to be; and all that. That might not register explicitly that this is what they’re picking up on, but subconsciously they’re seeing a place where it’s obvious that people care. And of course, with the Flatirons background, that doesn’t hurt either. I think our team is critical to getting people interested in coming here and staying here.

Obviously the academics are the principal motivation for considering CU in the first place, but once you’ve gotten off the plane, and you’re walking around campus, you see our work. I’d like to think it has a big impact on people’s decisions. I think they like it and they feel comfortable here, and they know it’s maintained. Parents see it and they know that someone here cares about the institution and the upkeep of the place, and that translates in other ways. It seems like a welcoming, reasonable place.

Also, for my work partner and me, public safety is a huge part of it. We have approximately 4,000 cultivated trees on campus that we care for. It’s really difficult to keep track of the condition of all of those trees and to make sure that they’re safe to be under. We have to visually inspect, or climb, or use the bucket truck to get into these trees and inspect them. We always keep an eye on them and assess them after storm events, wind events and different things like that. And we have to watch for disease and pest issues, to make sure the structural integrity of the trees is above the threshold for public safety. It’s an enormous part of our work, and it’s the thing that wakes me up in the middle of the night, like when the wind blows and I hear the wind howling, I’m thinking, “I hope this and that are ok.” And to our credit, we take safety very seriously and we’ve spent a lot of years keeping everything as safe as we can and we work hard to do it. It’s an important part of the job and it’s a way that I feel that I have a direct impact on the safety and welfare of the public that uses our campus.

CU-Boulder has the new “Be Boulder.” platform to highlight the positive impacts and achievements of the university, and is using “Be statements,” like “Be Innovative” or “Be Driven.” As the Lead Arborist on the CU-Boulder campus, what “Be statement” would you use?

I would say, “Be flexible.” Every week and every day I have a work plan, but things rarely go as planned. Things change. We have a lot of construction and things that you don’t hear about until the last minute, and different projects and different installations and things. And so we frequently have to be flexible-minded, be open-minded to just switching gears and changing the type of work we’re doing pretty quickly. We also have to be flexible in that we have a lot of challenges for the types of trees we’re maintaining and that people want to install and have on campus. We have to do some new and creative things to get those trees to live here, because they don’t belong here. Also, a lot of people have really strong opinions about trees. People are emotional about trees, and they have strong feelings and strong ideas about what should and shouldn’t happen to the trees on campus. I have to make decisions about what to do on campus - sometimes based on safety - and so I have to be flexible and open-minded and satisfy a lot of different people and many different push-and-pulls. So as an arborist, I would say, “Be flexible. Be open-minded. Be creative. Be experimental.”