It’s a nasty political season in Salinas with insults and media boycotts.

Even when it works beautifully, local government is messy. But in this election season, it’s taken a turn for the nasty – and the immature.

One of the beautiful, if messy things: Anyone gets to speak at the microphone during public comment periods.

On Tuesday, Oct. 13, Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue opened the public comment period with the usual guidelines: Each speaker has two minutes, and must not make any threatening remarks toward others.

Things started out pretty normally. One speaker advocated for reducing pesticide use, another announced upcoming Veterans Day activities. Jose Guerra, a candidate for City Council District 2 (see Squid Fry), had some choice words for the incumbent, Tony Barrera, and other incumbents: “Que vergüenza, you guys are embarrassing… You guys up there, you need to be replaced.”

This all is captured on video, creating a public record of the comments. It’s easy to hear on the City of Salinas’ YouTube channel, but the camera shows the speakers’ backs, rather than their faces – atypical.

At one point, while mayoral candidate Daniel Muñoz is standing in line, another mayoral candidate, Peter Szalai, can be seen whispering to him. Szalai says he was concerned about the camera direction because Muñoz and several supporters arrived wearing Muñoz for Mayor T-shirts. Back in March, after Szalai first announced his candidacy at the podium, he was called into a meeting with City Manager René Mendez, City Attorney Chris Callihan and City Clerk Patricia Serratos. In Szalai’s telling, they directed him not to use the public lectern for his campaign activity, with directions that he says included a prohibition on wearing any political clothing.

I did not get to ask city officials about this, because they seem to have an allergy to responding to media inquiries these days. Sophia Rome, the city’s public information officer, ignored repeated text messages and voicemails and emails.

Muñoz showed up wearing a campaign T-shirt specifically to challenge this supposed rule.

“I went to the meeting to watch the spectacle,” Szalai says. Instead, he became the spectacle.

He thought it was odd that the cameras were not showing the front of the Muñoz for Mayor T-shirts (so did I). But he took matters into his own hands, walking up to the IT control room and swinging the door open, seeming to startle the worker inside, he says – and clearly crossing a line.

“I went to the meeting to watch the spectacle.”

I would have asked Muñoz about his intention, but just like Salinas City Hall, I didn’t get a chance. In his case, it’s not just lack of responsiveness – he’s holding a grudge against the Weekly (and our affiliated digital outlets Monterey County Now and Salinas Valley Now) and will not speak to our staff because he doesn’t agree with our editorial board’s endorsement of Measure H.

Before telling me he would no longer talk to me, Muñoz said, “I am boycotting the Weekly, and telling everyone I know to boycott the Weekly… We’re going to shut down fake news like the Weekly.”

A few things: We are not “fake news,” even though I’m fully aware that many readers of this very column disagree with me, and with our paper more generally – this is not a propaganda machine. Muñoz seems to think that because our editorial board arrived at a different conclusion than he did, we are “fake.” (Ironically, a lot of what the No on Measure H proponents are talking about now is coming from information reported in our news section by Staff Writer Celia Jiménez.)

This is immature at best, but it’s behavior that fits right into these times during President Donald Trump’s presidency. If you don’t like the press coverage, you insult and diminish the press.

In Monterey, mayoral candidate Vince Malfitano took it a step further, serving a subpoena on Staff Writer Aric Sleeper seeking suspected source communications. (That subpoena is now moot after Malfitano reached a settlement agreement over a pending restraining order case against him, and the case was dismissed.)

Often, we feel insulated from the antics of Washington, D.C. here at a local newspaper covering local government. But increasingly, it appears to be trickling down.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com.