The ‘fixer-upper’: County Manager, former Mayor Tony Petelos ready to retire after 35 years of public service

When Tony Petelos left the Hoover mayor’s job to become Jefferson County’s first county manager in 2011, a lot of people told him he was crazy.

Hoover was considered a “happening” city where things were running smoothly, and Jefferson County’s government was in disarray, facing bankruptcy and still lacking public trust after 22 county officials had gone to prison for corruption in the preceding years.

Petelos himself even questioned the sanity of the move when then County Commission President David Carrington asked him if he would consider the job. But Petelos’ wife, Teresa, told him he needed to take it. As a three-term state legislator who had been chairman of Jefferson County’s legislative delegation, he had been around long enough to know how to tackle the county’s many issues politically, she told him. So he made the jump.

Now, as Petelos prepares to retire in June after 10 years as county manager, he said he’s glad he made the move and is proud of the progress the county has made with a new group of leaders. But the road hasn’t been easy.

“We inherited a mess,” Petelos said. “It was a challenge.”

Jefferson County went through bankruptcy, made a controversial decision to eliminate inpatient care at Cooper Green Mercy Hospital, closed the county nursing home, cut 1,000 jobs and was held in contempt of court in a decades-old federal court case regarding the county’s hiring practices — all within an 18-month period of time.

“It was about as bad as I expected,” Petelos said of the county’s condition when he came into the job. “The first six years were chaotic — issue after issue after issue.”

But the county has emerged from bankruptcy and is in a much better position financially, with more than $100 million in general fund reserves and another $16 million in a “catastrophic” contingency fund, Petelos said.

Cooper Green, now known as Cooper Green Mercy Health Services, is offering more services to the public, just in a different way, Petelos said. And in December, after 45 years of scrutiny, the county was released from a federal consent decree after proving its hiring and personnel practices had been revamped to ensure fairness for women and minorities.

Petelos said he promised U.S. Judge Lynwood Smith several years ago he would stick around long enough to get that case resolved.

‘LIFE IS SHORT’

Now, at age 67, he feels like he has accomplished the primary tasks he was hired to do and has a strong team in place to carry on the county’s work.

“It’s a good time for me to leave,” he said. “Life is short. I’m still very healthy, and there are still some things I want to do in life that I can do for myself.”

While dealing with weighty issues at work, Petelos also has gone through some personal health battles.

He was diagnosed with bladder and prostate cancer in May 2014 and went through chemotherapy and three major surgeries. He was hospitalized 15 times in 12 months due to complications and infections.

“For a year and a half, it was touch and go,” Petelos said.

The cancer scare really surprised him, he said, because he had never really had any serious health problems — not even the flu, he said. But he’s thankful to live in the Birmingham metro area with UAB Hospital, he said. “UAB literally saved my life.”

He’s healthy again and back to taking only one pill for blood pressure, he said.

Petelos and his wife both came down with COVID-19 in February, and that experience convinced him it was time for him to retire, he said.

“I was out for three weeks with COVID. I didn’t get any calls,” he said.

He would call to check in with people and was told everything was running smoothly.

“These folks we have in place can run the organization,” he said. “I’m really proud of the commission and leadership team and employees being able to work together and get things done.”

Petelos said the county has filled all of its director and deputy director jobs with a diverse group of talented people from across the country and will be in good hands without him.

He said he loves his job, but “at this time in my life, I’m ready to do something out of the public’s eye.”

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Petelos has been in the public eye for 35 years and said he has enjoyed his time of public service. He comes from humble beginnings, the son of two immigrants from Greece.

His father died when he was 9, leaving his mother to raise five children under the age of 14 by herself. She had never worked outside the home and didn’t speak English well. The family, living in Birmingham’s Ensley community, used public transportation and was on food stamps.

“It was rough,” Petelos said. “My mother did great raising us.”

He and his siblings did odd jobs to help out, and Petelos went to work full-time in construction immediately after graduating high school and went to college at night.

He worked for his brother, who had taken over their father’s construction business, and later went on to start his own construction company, Multicon, which he operated for almost 30 years until 2007.

Petelos earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from UAB in 1981 and was elected to the state Legislature in 1986, surprising many people by winning as a Republican in what had been considered a Democratic district.

He was re-elected in 1990 and 1994 and served as chairman of the Jefferson County delegation the latter two terms. In 1997, Gov. Fob James drafted him to take over as commissioner of the Alabama Department of Human Resources, which was mired in controversy.

Petelos said the DHR job probably was the most fulfilling job he has had because he and some good employees were able to turn the agency around, provide better oversight for children and investigate abuse complaints in a more timely fashion, getting the agency released from a federal court case.

“We made some major changes, and there’s no doubt the changes we made saved lives,” he said. “Children were dying in foster care and being abused.”

LEADING HOOVER

Gov. Don Siegelman kept Petelos as DHR commissioner in 1999, but then Petelos decided to run for mayor of Hoover and won that job in 2004.

The previous group of elected officials had started squabbling publicly with personal verbal attacks during meetings and ethics complaints being filed, and Petelos said he wanted to end the public bickering. He and a mostly new group of council members took office in 2004.

His tenure in Hoover wasn’t without some controversy. The city faced allegations in lawsuits that police and elected officials tried to drive Hispanics out of the city through racial profiling, illegal searches and unlawful incarceration.

Less than a year after he and a new City Council took office, the city terminated a contract that allowed a Multicultural Resource Center to operate in a city-owned building.

And Petelos also faced criticism for reducing the city’s contribution to the Hoover school system as the city dealt with tighter revenues due to the recession.

Petelos said he thoroughly enjoyed being Hoover’s mayor and had a great leadership team surrounding him, particularly former Executive Director Allen Pate, who handled much of the day-to-day administration.

He has a lot of great memories from his time of mayor. Those include Hoover native Taylor Hicks winning season five of the “American Idol” singing competition and Hoover dancing instructor Fabian Sanchez appearing as a professional on “Dancing with the Stars,” not to mention all the SEC Baseball Tournaments, Regions Charity Classic golf tournaments, ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings.

He very fondly remembers when President George W. Bush visited the Hoover Public Safety Center in 2007 to see the city’s program for using ethanol in city vehicles while in town for a fundraiser for Gov. Bob Riley. Petelos said Bush invited him to ride in his limousine with him to the fundraiser, and he remembers thinking how proud his mother would have been of him.

RESTORING TRUST

Petelos said while he and other new leaders for Jefferson County accomplished a lot, he’s most proud that they were able to restore public trust in county government following a lengthy string of county officials going to prison and people having to wait in long lines at the courthouse to receive county services such as car tag renewals.

“It was a dysfunctional, corrupt organization,” Petelos said. “I’m not saying we brought it all back, but we brought a lot of the trust back.”

County Commission President Jimmie Stephens said Petelos was “the right man at the right time for the citizens of Jefferson County.”

Petelos brought his expertise and knowledge of city, county and state government to transform the way Jefferson County does business, Stephens said.

“Tony made Jefferson County what it is today,” he said. “He helped us transform through the crisis phase, and he put us on solid footing. … He understood Jefferson County politically from serving in the Legislature and being mayor of the second most populous municipality in the county. We were lucky to have him.”

Petelos has an ability to work with people and communicate his position in a respectful way, even when he disagrees with someone, which translates into effective actions, Stephens said.

He said the problem that plagues Congress and so many other government bodies across the country right now is a lack of ability to compromise.

“Compromise is not a bad word,” he said. “You have to compromise because you have opposing views, and if you don’t compromise, you’re never going to get anything done unless you ram it down somebody’s throat. That’s just not the way to do it.”

He knows he has a reputation of being a “fixer-upper” and thinks his experience in construction served him well in government.

“If you’re a contractor, you’re dealing with a lot of issues at the same time,” he said. That includes dealing with a lot of subcontractors and having a limited amount of time to complete jobs, he said.

Stephens said Petelos’ leadership has enabled Jefferson County to get back on solid ground with economic development, noting recent additions of companies such as Amazon, Carvana and a new 1.2 million-square-foot Lowe’s distribution center in Bessemer.

Petelos has “turned a Model T into a Cadillac,” Stephens said. “It’s been a pleasure to work with him.”

When asked about his history of jumping into the middle of controversy, Petelos said he has always been one to love a challenge.

He has been skydiving, hiked the Himalayas near Mount Everest, gone dog sledding through the wilderness in Canada in temperatures 15 degrees below zero and trekked through a rainforest in Costa Rica, not to mention battling his way through cancer.

Once he retires, he and his wife do plan to take a return trip to Greece, where he has family, once international travel is deemed safe enough, he said. They also plan to sell their home in Hoover, where they have lived for 21 years, and move to Bankhead Lake on the Warrior River, where they already have a second home.

He’s not sure what exactly he will do in retirement. “Teresa’s got a to-do list about six months long,” he said. “Once I finish that, something will come along.”