Service Delivery Study

Contract

  • Consultant: Citygate Associates, LLC
  • Original agreement executed: July 29, 2025
  • Signatories: Karen Pinkos, City Manager; Chad Jackson, President, Citygate Associates
  • Proposed schedule (Citygate’s own proposal): “approximately six to eight months from contract execution.”

Source: CITYGATE ASSOCIATES, LLC 2025.7.29-1.pdf, Section 5.7, “Proposed Project Schedule.” Contract execution date confirmed in CITYGATE ASSOCIATES LLC Amendment 20260630.pdf, Recital A.

Change Order #1

  • Dated: December 11, 2025
  • Subject: restructuring the Mid-Project Briefing from a single consolidated presentation into a high-level Citywide overview (December 16, 2025) plus seven separate department-level briefings (Administration, Community Development, Finance, Fire, Police, Public Works, Recreation)
  • Cost impact: “will not exceed $4,945, inclusive of all hourly fees and our standard administration cost”
  • Signed by: Karen Pinkos, December 11, 2025

Source: Citygate Associates CHANGE ORDER 2025.12.111.pdf, letter to Karen Pinkos dated December 11, 2025.

This change order was a scope refinement (more detailed departmental briefings), not a scope expansion or cost overrun in the traditional sense — Citygate itself notes it reduced other project-team participation to help offset the added cost.

The Amendment

  • Dated: June 30, 2026 — the exact day the original contract term expired
  • Substantive change: one sentence — “Section 1.1 of the Agreement shall be amended such that the term of the Agreement shall be extended from June 30, 2026, to December 31, 2026.”
  • Cost change: none stated
  • Reason stated in the amendment: none — the document contains no explanation for the extension beyond the single sentence changing the end date

Source: CITYGATE ASSOCIATES LLC Amendment 20260630.pdf, full text of the amendment (one page).

Timeline Summary

Date Event
July 29, 2025 Original contract executed
— Proposed duration: 6–8 months (per Citygate’s own proposal)
Dec 11, 2025 Change Order #1: briefing structure revised, +$4,945
June 30, 2026 Original contract term expires — same day, amendment signed extending to Dec 31, 2026, no reason stated
Dec 31, 2026 New contract end date

From execution (July 2025) to the new end date (December 2026) is 17 months — more than double Citygate’s own original 6–8 month estimate.

Relationship to the State Auditor Recommendation

This is the organizational/staffing study the State Auditor recommended the City complete by September 2021, as the first step before any compensation study. See the Sequencing Case Study for the full comparison against the Auditor’s recommended order — this contract was not executed until July 2025, nearly four years after that target date, and roughly three years after the City had already completed its compensation study.