With how beautiful the state of Oregon is, especially in the springtime, it is safe to say that the University of Oregon campus is equally as beautiful. From the moment students arrive on campus, they are greeted with a blend of historical and modern buildings connected to the great outdoors with amazing landscaping. The UO campus has fostered an open academic environment with a stunning backdrop for students, faculty and visitors that they are sure to remember.
For students and visitors alike to enjoy such an incredible campus, it wouldn’t be possible if it were not for the university groundskeeping and landscaping crews. Daily, groundskeepers arrive on campus at 6 a.m. to do their walk around to look for hazards in their zone like broken bottles or anything that needs attention before students start to wake up.
Todd Gillen, a grounds maintenance worker two, started as a field biologist in northern California and transitioned to working in agriculture, which led him to settle down in Eugene, and he’s now worked with the university for five years so far.
“One thing I like about the job is it’s pretty autonomous, so we get to prove ourselves and decide how we want to run through our day and what we want to prioritize our time on,” Gillen said. “A lot of it is curb appeal, so you try to look and make the places that are most in the public and students’ eyes look the best.” Depending on the season, Gillen and other groundskeepers will get work orders throughout the day with specific requests of work that needs to be done, like pruning bushes in front of a window of a hall.
Most of the groundskeeping staff works diligently on campus to maintain and improve the landscape, but some work on off-campus housing for students returning to school or looking for a graduate degree as well. Eric Edmondson, also a grounds maintenance worker twowho works for the housing department at the Spencer’s View Apartments, has been at the university for nine and a half years.
“The crew that works for the university are good people who work hard so folks can come here and enjoy the landscape and people can go to class with pride in where they live,” Edmondson said. “It’s also just fun to be around a place with so much hope with the students, and there’s just immense positivity being here where people are here to enrich and better their lives.”
With the amount of work that groundskeepers receive, it is hard to not only maintain the campus but also improve the campus as well. And with a lack of support from management for some, it can make the job even more difficult.
“As soon as you get above our inner team and if you throw an idea up above and everybody agrees it is something we should do, it all of a sudden just stalls,” Gillen said. The university management is organized with the executive director of Campus Planning and Facilities Management (CPFM), the operations manager, another middle manager, a direct coordinator and then finally the groundskeeping crew, so it is easy for communication to be lost amidst the chain.
“People on campus all the time stop and say thank you for what you do, but you want to hear that from the people who are in charge of you and advocating for you to get more money for resources, better tools and more staff, and without that, we have to work harder,” Gillen said.
Even though groundskeepers battle with a lack of support and recognition, they all still have pride and passion for the work they do to keep the campus looking extraordinary, along with providing them stability.
“That was definitely a big thing for me,” Gillen said. “At some point, after you’re nomadically moving around a lot, you kind of want to settle somewhere and have a community. I mean, I was hauling all my stuff for probably most of my 20s. And then when I settled down here, I was just looking for a gig that would be stable because I had a newborn kid and a wife that did not want to travel around so much.”
Along with that security, landscaping allows groundskeepers to find achievement in the daily work they do and be fulfilled at the end of the day.
“I’ve just always liked landscaping to be able to look back and see what I’ve done and see what I’ve accomplished,” Edmondson said. “Getting to enhance the property and just seeing it all come together whether that’s pruning plants, weeding an area, having a lawn mowed or having fresh bark mulch in the beds — having it look dialed is just a really satisfying end result.”
Spencer's View Apartments, housing hundreds of students and other residents, provides an affordable housing and childcare to every person living there. (Miles Cull/Emerald)
