San Jose has come to a tentative agreement with eight of its nine unions on a Measure B settlement, city officials announced Friday.

When politicians have bad news to deliver, news they don’t really want anyone to hear, they’ll often deliver it at a Friday afternoon press conference—nobody watches the TV news on Friday night and nobody reads the paper on Saturday. But Mayor Chuck Reed’s announcement last Friday that San Jose is in a “fiscal and public safety emergency” was like a big squirt of gasoline on the smoldering heap of embers that is the city’s relationship with its public-employee unions. And the resulting flare-up did not go unnoticed.