Greedy Bastards

This story is adapted from Greedy Bastards, by Sheryl Sculley.

I can’t take credit for my books title. The President of the local police union inspired it, back when writing a book was just an item on my to-do-once-I-retire list.

The year was 2014, and I was serving as the city manager of San Antonio, Texas — one of the fastest-growing cities in America. Back then I managed a $2.3 billion budget and thousands of employees, some of them governed by collective bargaining agreements. At the time, my team and I were guiding the city through the messy process of updating those agreements, which triggered a campaign of nasty attack ads against me.

These ads attempted to cast me in the role of villain for asking union members to start paying health insurance premiums for their children and spouses.

That part of the story was true: the city was asking police officers to start contributing to the cost of their families’ health insurance.

To officers, this felt like a big change because it was the first time they’d been asked to participate in the cost of their health insurance. Nationally, of course, it’s the norm. Most workers who are lucky enough to have employer-provided health insurance for themselves and their families must contribute a portion of their earnings toward the premiums.

San Antonio had ignored that changing landscape. We had funded nearly 100 percent of health insurance for public safety employees and their spouses and children for twenty-five years. During that time, most employers nationwide had found financing such a benefit to be unsustainable. But our city kept renewing contracts with the San Antonio Police Officers Association and the San Antonio Professional Firefighters Association that included this excessive benefit and more. Now, the ballooning cost of this unchecked practice was crowding out other key city services like street maintenance, drainage improvements, parks, and libraries.

WHO ARE THESE GREEDY BASTARDS?

The union’s ads ignored these financial realities and focused instead on demonizing me. In one ad spot, police association president Mike Helle uttered the phrase that would become the title of my book: “The city manager and her team has done everything she possibly could to make us look like we’re a bunch of greedy bastards trying to break the city of San Antonio.”

That part of the story was not true. I hadn’t painted our police officers as greedy bastards. Quite the contrary. In both public and private, I had expressed my deep respect for and gratitude toward our first responders. After almost forty years in city management, I had no shortage of my own stories about the heroism I’d witnessed from our women and men in uniform. I’m also the daughter of a union leader and my high regard for organized labor was well known.

Of course, none of these people are greedy bastards. You’ll learn that my quarrel was with the leadership of our city’s police and fire unions, not with San Antonio’s 4,000 uniformed employees. Our first responders were simply spun-up by people they trusted who told them their city was lying, that ballooning benefit costs weren’t really draining our budget, and that they were entitled to unchanged contracts.

Yet I knew a looming financial crisis when I saw one. And it fell to me, as city manager, to adjust course and steer my community clear of it.

Why then did I title my book in honor of a false statement meant to malign me? Because although Helle’s statement wasn’t true, it was important for two reasons.

First, it foreshadowed the way union representatives would ultimately portray our city.

When the city explained that future budgets couldn’t support all the extras San Antonio police officers and firefighters had come to enjoy, union representatives told the city to just raise taxes. (Easy for them to say when fewer than half of our police officers and firefighters actually live in the city!) After outside experts independently confirmed that the current benefits model would soon push all non-public-safety spending out of the budget, union reps pivoted and accused the city of hiding money.

Second, the phrase was emblematic of just how dirty this dis- agreement was going to get.

I’m far from naive. I knew we would encounter resistance to remodeling union benefits. I also believed that a data-driven, honest, and transparent process would lead to consensus and a win-win result.

There I was mistaken.

Changing our public safety contracts became very personal and triggered vicious attacks against me and others who supported the effort. I had not foreseen that the union leadership would be willing to prioritize maintaining the status quo even at the expense of harm to our city government.

TELLING THE REAL STORY

As you read my book, you’ll learn about the challenges I was asked to address when I was recruited to San Antonio in 2005, and how we prioritized and addressed those issues, and many more, during my tenure. You’ll also learn about how we transformed an underperforming city government and made it one of the best performing local government organizations in the country.

I wasn’t recruited to San Antonio to overhaul the police and fire collective bargaining agreements; but you’ll hear why in 2013, the city council and I agreed that they needed to change. And those two words — greedy bastards — will take on new meaning. You’ll discover that those words may be directed at you, your colleagues, or your own elected officials if you try to remodel your police and fire union contracts.

Still, you may have to; because the story I’m about to tell you isn’t really about a single city; it’s about Any City, USA.

In this true-life Texas tale things may have gotten bigger, meaner, and louder than they will get in other cities. At its core, though, our story is an echo of others playing out in communities nationwide. The fact that our city government needed to replace an outdated business model in order to survive isn’t specific to San Antonio.

In my book, you’ll learn about the financial, political, and emotional strings that two powerful public safety unions pulled to advance their own self-interests. You’ll read about the bloated benefits packages they negotiated long ago. And you’ll read how their overgrown contracts were able to survive two decades’ worth of city council votes and union negotiations. My hope is that you’ll benefit from the hard-won lessons that my team and I learned about how to best make our way through all of it.

I decided to write my book because for all the press and social media coverage that the union situation generated, the core issue was still largely misunderstood. And that’s a problem. Public servants and private citizens alike need to understand why these changes were critical. That knowledge may make it harder for union leaders to ever again mislead people as successfully as they did in San Antonio.

The union’s self-defeating war on city leaders obscured the remarkable transformation and growth of San Antonio that I both witnessed and helped lead during my fourteen-year tenure. While we implemented sophisticated financial management, we also launched ambitious capital campaigns at five-year intervals and used our new triple-A credit rating to borrow at favorable interest rates, investing in a city long neglected.

We extended the San Antonio Riverwalk, expanded our park system, added senior and community centers, partnered with the private sector to develop a comprehensive full- service homeless campus, and developed the first-ever city budget based on the concept of equity to begin to address the economic disparities in our city.

Led by Mayor Julián Castro, we designed and implemented PreK4SA, one of the most ambitious early childhood education programs in the country. High-quality, all-day pre-kindergarten is now approaching universal adoption in San Antonio.

My team and I chose to go beyond these and other popular accomplishments to take on the messy, complicated union issue. We could have left it for the next city manager. We didn’t have to address it; no one before me had. But we embraced the challenge because it was the right thing to do for our city.

The changes made to the police and fire union contracts will save San Antonio more than $150 million over the agreements’ five-year terms. More importantly, the city now has a sustainable financial framework that will allow it to balance public-safety spending with other needs, such as better infrastructure and affordable housing.

To make those things happen, though, my colleagues and I made professional and personal sacrifices. The results are worth it. But I wish we could have done it without tearing this city apart. I wish residents hadn’t been drawn into an ugly fight that pitted the public safety employees they loved against the municipal leaders they respected, ultimately damaging their opinion of both.

Whether you’re an elected official, a resident, or a city employee, I hope that my story will give you the insight, knowledge, and tools to guide your city through the complicated process of an organizational turnaround. And I hope your rewards will be as amazing as those reaped in San Antonio.

It all began when I left Phoenix for San Antonio in 2005. Greedy Bastards is my story.

To learn more about Sheryl Sculley and her story, you can find Greedy Bastards on Amazon.

[1] Josh Baugh, “Police union changes strategy,” San Antonio Express-News, July 24, 2014, expressnews.com/news/local/article/Police-union-changes-strategy-5645433.php.

SHERYL SCULLEY is an award-winning city manager who is considered an authority on city management. She gained national attention for dealing with unsustainable benefits for San Antonio’s police and fire unions — and in doing so, steered the city away from a future financial crisis. During her tenure, San Antonio achieved a AAA bond rating and invested billions of dollars into critical infrastructure updates and additions. Prior to serving in San Antonio, Sculley was the assistant city manager in Phoenix and city manager of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Sculley is a life member of the International City Management Association and a fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration. After 45 years of public service, Sculley retired from city management in 2019.