I’m no prognosticator, but I think it’s a safe bet that Sheryl Sculley won’t be voting for Manuel Medina in this year’s mayoral election.

Medina, the boisterous chairman of the Bexar County Democratic Party, has positioned himself as the rogue outsider in the mayoral sweepstakes, firing wildly at everything from the Vista Ridge water project to what he views as excessively high property tax appraisals.

But his most consistent target has been Sculley.

During a Feb. 7 town hall at the studios of radio station KTSA, Medina and the two other major candidates in the race — Mayor Ivy Taylor and District 8 Councilman Ron Nirenberg — were asked by a listener to “rate the performance” of Sculley and answer whether she deserves her rich compensation, which amounts to $450,000 in base pay and up to $100,000 in bonuses this year.

Taylor said Sculley’s skill at managing a 12,000-employee organization and a $2.5 billion municipal budget make her worth every penny. Nirenberg employed an old Babe Ruth joke (in which the Yankee slugger defended his request for a bigger salary than President Herbert Hoover received by saying, “I had a better year than he did”) to make the same point.

Medina disagreed.

“It’s not her performance that concerns me,” he said. “It’s her politics.”

Medina cited two examples: Sculley’s acrimonious battles with police and fire unions over the past three years and her appearance at a November 2016 Tech-Bloc rally to advocate — in advance of a City Council vote — for the extension of a pilot program for ride-hailing companies.

If Medina’s point was that Sculley’s appearance at the rally crossed the line separating policymaking (the province of the council) and policy implementation (the responsibility of city staff), it was not very persuasive. As a rule, city staff makes recommendations on how the council should approach particular issues, and Sculley’s public support for the ride-hailing ordinance fell within the bounds of that tradition.

Also, Medina’s depiction of the situation — that Sculley went out “promoting ride-share when she knows half the council members are against it” — was an exaggeration. Although a few votes were up in the air until the last minute, the council ultimately approved the ordinance 9-2.

Medina concluded his answer by suggesting that City Hall might not be big enough for both him and Sculley.

“As mayor, we will talk about her, whether she stays or not,” he said. “I think she’s going to walk away if Manuel Medina is elected mayor.”

This amounted to the harshest stance on Sculley that we’ve seen from a serious mayoral candidate since then-Mayor Phil Hardberger persuaded her to relocate from Phoenix in 2005.

The closest comparison is the 2015 campaign of former Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson.

Adkisson frequently argued that a leadership void in the mayor’s office had allowed Sculley to assume too much power. He also said Sculley didn’t deserve a bonus because her collective-bargaining battles with the police union meant that she had “failed to perform the core function” of her job.

That argument didn’t resonate for Adkisson, who finished a distant fourth in the 2015 race. With a collective-bargaining deal now in place between the city and the police union, it seems even less likely that Medina will get much traction with it.

KLRN backlash

On Friday, this column looked at the decision by Arthur Rojas Emerson, the president and CEO of public-television station KLRN, to spike a commentary by “Texas Week” host Rick Casey that was critical of U.S. District 21 Congressman Lamar Smith.

Emerson’s action met with a swift denunciation from TX21Indivisible, a group of Smith’s constituents organized against the Republican agenda supported by Smith and President Donald Trump. The organization released the following statement Friday afternoon:

“The fact is Lamar refuses to meet with 30 percent of his district that resides in San Antonio and Austin. We believe Lamar Smith should hold a town hall rather than try to intimidate local journalists. Come talk to the voters. Stop hiding behind President Trump.

“And to Mr. Emerson, we must say that many of us are consumers of and donors to public television. Silencing or censoring your journalists — for any reason, especially for political ends — is chilling and completely unacceptable.”