Ms. Bristow has more than 25 years of experience in high-level management, working with city councils, boards of directors, commissions, developers, unions, communities at large, special districts, and homeowner associations. She has experience in both the public- and private-sector, having served Alameda County for 16 years and the City of Hayward for more than 10 years in a variety of capacities, as well as serving as an Executive Director for West Coast Code Consultants since 2018. As the Neighborhood Partnership Manager in Hayward, she developed and managed the Mural Arts Program, which won the 2011 Helen Putnam Award for Excellence in the area of Community Services and Development. She also facilitated and executed the settlement agreement between Caltrans and various third parties. Before working for the City of Hayward, Ms. Bristow served Alameda County in the roles of Deputy Planning Section Chief in the Office of Emergency Services and Redevelopment Specialist for the County’s Community Development Agency. Ms. Bristow is skilled in crisis management, advanced mediation, and comprehensive facilitation. For more than 35 years, she has served as Chief Executive Officer of Energy Company, which, in part, provides organizational and executive life coaching. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Administrative/Criminal Justice from California State University, East Bay (formerly Hayward), and is currently working on her master’s degree in Organizational Leadership and Innovation from Grand Canyon University.
“I was absolutely thrilled with the report because it was very comprehensive, very detailed. I call it the ‘time-in-motion study’ almost and some of the aspects [are] ‘how does your paper flow? How can you make your processes better? . . . As a government agency, how can we provide better service to the constituents?’ And to us we think that this study identifies those things down to all of the small paper processes and flows.”
Retired City Manager City of Vista, CA
“I wanted to offer my compliments to Citygate, to Mr. Gary for this very comprehensive report.”
San Luis Obispo Council Member
“Thank you so much for this training. This was the best PIO training I’ve ever received.”
S-403 Information Officer class participant
“I am very much appreciative of Citygate’s comprehensive view of all the issues. And you have been very candid and very forthright in the problem areas that you have identified and we appreciate that. Quite often sometimes people choose to gloss over those issues and therefore we never can get a real good handle on the problem to resolve it. And I very much appreciate your insight and your intuitive natures that you have all experienced in your government services and trying to identify where our problem areas are so we can identify for the public. I very much appreciate the idea and the comments that you made that we are talking about the citizens who come to the planning Department as customers. And so you’ve done a great service for us and we are certainly appreciative of all your efforts.”
Commissioner Jackson County
“I think Citygate has done a great job. It seems like you’ve been most thorough and even-handed in your evaluations and you’ve given us certainly a lot of suggestions and guidelines to work with.”
City of Vista, CA
“I am really, really impressed. I am impressed at the exhaustiveness of your study, impressed at the honesty and candor with which you expressed your findings; I am very impressed at the constructive tone of it, and that you came in under budget as well. So, thank you very much. I think that this document is going to be a cornerstone for us really moving forward for the next five, ten, twenty [years], half a century.”
Salt Lake City Council Meeting