Sheryl Sculley has been an active member of ICMA for more than 45 years. Most notably, she served as city manager of San Antonio, Texas, from 2005 to 2019. There she functioned as the chief executive officer of the municipal corporation with 13,000 employees, an annual operating and capital budget of $2.8 billion, and a city population of 1.5 million residents.

Sculley was recruited to San Antonio to undertake an organizational turn-around and improve the professionalism of city government. The

team she assembled to lead the city of San Antonio enabled the city to become one of the highest performing municipal governments in the nation, and the only city with a population of more than one million to consistently earn AAA bond ratings from the three major financial rating service agencies.

Her impact goes way beyond the numbers. In partnership with the elected officials of San Antonio, she helped design and implement 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. During her 14-year tenure as city manager, she led the effort to undertake more than $3 billion in infrastructure improvements for the community, regained public trust through strong ethical practices, and systematically reshaped government operations in all city departments.

Sculley is a life member of ICMA and a fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration. She is also an adjunct professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. Her commitment to next generation leadership in local government spans several decades as a university professor and university and high school guest speaker on public administration. In San Antonio, she implemented a fellowship program for MPA graduates that has become one of the most sought-after fellowships in the country.

Post retirement, she continues her commitment by serving on the San Antonio Early Matters Board, the Board of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, the Texas 2036 Board, the PN-3 Texas Business Advisory Board, and the Downtown Austin Alliance Board. In addition to her extensive volunteer work, Sculley joined the MGIC (NYSE: MTG) corporate board in October 2019, a company whose mission is to support affordable housing.

Sculley 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. In 2020, she authored and published a book on leadership and her city experience in San Antonio, Greedy Bastards: One City’s Texas Size Struggle to Avoid a Financial Crisis, which made the Amazon #1 Best Seller list. She frequently speaks at ICMA state and local meetings and conferences discussing her book.