Denver City Council has rejected a proposed contract extension that would have handed a Florida-based video production company an eight-year deal worth up to $1 million to keep producing the city's employee recruitment campaigns. The proposal would have added $600,000 to Sunny Side Up Solutions LLC's existing agreement with the city, pushing its total value to $1,000,000 and extending its end date from 2026 all the way to December 31, 2031.
The contract had cleared the council's Governance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee on a consent agenda on August 4, meaning it was headed toward approval without much floor debate, according to The Common News. But the full council pumped the brakes, ultimately voting down what would have amounted to an eight-year relationship between Denver and the company, as reported by the Denver Gazette.
Sunny Side Up Solutions LLC is based in Florida and was founded by Jennifer “Jennie” Castor, who serves as the company's executive producer, according to city documents and LinkedIn profiles cited by the Gazette's Deborah Grigsby. Castor previously worked as press secretary for former Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, and Denver first awarded her firm a contract in 2023. The company was tasked with producing employment brand videos and all ongoing video projects for the city's Office of Human Resources, including recurring campaigns branded #EmployeeTV, #SeeYourselfTV, and #SeeYourselfHere, according to filings reviewed by Legigram.
A Newsroom Connection Behind the Contract
Teresa Marchetta, who oversees marketing and communications for Denver's Office of Human Resources, worked at KMGH-TV in Denver for more than a decade — the same station where Castor also worked, and the two were employed there at the same time, per the Gazette's reporting. Marchetta told the paper that retaining marketing assets and brand consistency matters for the city's recruitment efforts. She said she plans to have further conversations with councilmembers to address their concerns and find a path forward.
The push to extend the contract came as Denver's Office of Human Resources lost its entire marketing budget, according to the Gazette. That loss lines up with the city's broader 2026 budget, which proposed cutting $951,600 in services and supplies from the office, targeting employment marketing, digital advertising, and recruitment vendor contracts, according to the Denver Gazette's earlier coverage of Mayor Mike Johnston's push to close a $200 million municipal deficit. Beyond the marketing cuts, the office was also slated to shed 33 positions — 20 filled and 13 vacant — under the city's deficit-reduction plan.
Council Flags Repeated Use of Executive Order Exemption
Councilmember Jamie Torres raised concerns that the city had invoked Executive Order Memorandum 8B for the second time in the past week to justify bypassing standard contract limits. Torres said relying on the executive order without seeking competitive bids when they are needed is a problem. Denver's contract policy generally limits agreements to three to five years and requires that contracts be put out for competitive bid after that window, and any extension beyond five years requires multiple additional levels of approval.
Rob McDermott of the Denver City Attorney's Office, who wrote the contract, confirmed that Executive Order Memorandum 8B allows agencies to justify agreements that exceed five years under special circumstances, including continuity of service and a lack of competition. McDermott said agencies must determine whether they truly need a continuing vendor relationship and must justify that need. The memorandum, issued by City Attorney Kerry Tipper in 2023, instructs city agencies to limit vendor contract terms to three to five years and reopen competitive bidding unless clear special circumstances are documented, according to the City and County of Denver.
A Pattern of Pushback on Contract Exemptions
Separate rules under Executive Order Memorandum 8A, issued in 2025, mandate that on-call service agreements generally run no longer than three years and require formal written justification to extend beyond that. Denver's City Auditor has previously flagged concerns about departments leaning too heavily on Executive Order 8 exceptions to avoid competitive bidding for contracts over $100,000. A 2022 audit found that Denver International Airport had improperly used non-competitive exceptions to extend concession contracts directly, a case that drew scrutiny at the time.
Denver's council has flexed this kind of oversight muscle before. In 2020, councilmembers voted down a proposed police union contract and forced the deal into independent arbitration, one of the few times the body rejected a major collective bargaining agreement outright, according to Colorado Politics reporting on that dispute. The Sunny Side Up Solutions rejection marks a smaller-scale but similar assertion of legislative authority over executive branch contracting.
For now, Denver's Office of Human Resources is left without a clear path to keep its #EmployeeTV and #SeeYourselfTV campaigns running under the existing vendor relationship, even as it continues trying to attract new city employees for hard-to-fill jobs with a diminished marketing budget. Whether the office will now open a formal competitive bidding process for video production services, and how it will fund recruitment marketing in the meantime, remains unresolved.
