Denver’s Office of Human Resources will have to get creative to attract new city employees and place them in “hard-to-fill” jobs after a proposed five-year contract extension, valued at $600,000, failed to gain favor with the Denver City Council.

The deal would have provided Florida-based Sunny Side Up Solutions LLC with an overall eight-year agreement with the City of Denver to produce “employment brand videos and all ongoing video projects.”

The company was awarded a previous contract with Denver in 2023, and city officials sought to extend the agreement to 2031.

“We’ve invested in a brand,” Teresa Marchetta, who oversees marketing and communications for OHR, said. “I’ve — in the budget cuts that you are all very well aware of over the last year — have lost my entire marketing budget, and so retaining some kind of assets for marketing is incredibly important and also brand consistency is incredibly important.”

Marchetta, in a statement to The Denver Gazette, said she is “looking forward to having more conversations with councilmembers to address their concerns and to finding a path forward.”

However, the problem for some councilmembers was not the quality of the videos or even the contract’s price tag — it was the fact that the contract extension extended the vendor’s agreement beyond Denver’s five-year policy, which seeks to limit the duration of contracts to three to five years, after which contracts are to be put out for competitive bid again.

Under Denver Mayor’s Executive Order, Memorandum 8B provides for exceptions for “special circumstances,” including continuity of service and lack of competition, to name a few.

While an extension resulting in an agreement of more than five years is not expressly prohibited, it is a deviation that requires multiple levels of approval.

Rob McDermott, who works in the City Attorney’s Office and wrote the contract, confirmed that the executive order allows justification to go beyond five years and that it was used for this contract.

“There are multiple justifications that an agency can use,” McDermott said, adding that “it’s up to the agencies to determine whether they need a continuing relationship with a vendor and it’s up to the agency to justify that.”

Councilmember Jamie Torres expressed concern, noting that this is the second time Executive Order 8B has been exercised in the past week.

“I just get worried that we’re circumventing some of the process that allows for competitiveness,” Torres said. “So, I’ll just raise my concern about that. If we continue to lean on the executive order without doing bids when we need to, I think that’s a problem.”

City documents and her LinkedIn profile show that Jennifer “Jennie” Castor is the founder and executive producer for Sunny Side Up Solutions LLC.

Former jobs for Castor include press secretary for former Denver Mayor Michael Hancock.

Both Castor and Marchetta were employed at the same time by KMGH-TV in Denver for more than a decade, according to their LinkedIn accounts.