Monterey mayoral candidate swings and misses

| OPINION

By Royal Calkins

This story amounts to a tiny tempest in a terribly small teapot but for the most selfish of reasons I’m hoping that at least a handful of readers will continue past this introduction. That’s because it’s my chance to respond to some inaccurate aspersions cast my way by a local politician after I cast some well-supported aspersions his way.

I’m talking about former Monterey City Councilmember Timothy Barrett, a longshot candidate for mayor of Monterey in next week’s election. Partly because he has almost no chance of knocking off the current mayor, Clyde Roberson, I will attempt to make this as simple as possible.

In a Voices of Monterey Bay piece that first aired on Oct. 11, I wrote about a Barrett web page that portrayed him as a current council member though he had lost his re-election bid two years ago. Click here and you can read that piece.

In it, I mentioned that I had hired Barrett six years ago to help me create another website, the Monterey Bay Partisan. I hired him because he said he was expert at such things and I was not. In the Oct. 11 article, I wrote that I had paid him but he did not do what he said he would do. I never saw any evidence that he even tried.

Barrett posted a lengthy response on his Facebook page on Oct. 18. In it, he wrote that I had only claimed to have paid him and that “no money was exchanged.” (I would have responded earlier but I’ve been out of town.)

Barrett apparently doesn’t know that banks keep electronic copies of checks. So it was not difficult to find a copy of the $800 check that I gave him on May 21, 2014. He didn’t endorse it but the back of the check indicates in bank speak that it was deposited. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t now try to come up with another explanation for the payment. I never bought anything from him and I wasn’t contributing to his council campaign, which wouldn’t start until three months later. If he comes up with an alternative scenario, I’d suggest not forming an opinion until you check with me.

None of this is a big deal, except to me. Barrett went on in his Facebook post to invent some other facts. For instance, he wrote, “Royal has several supposed quotes from me on his blog. They are completely fabricated and made up.” See for yourself. I quoted him a total of once, the part in which he said that perhaps his web page’s false claim of incumbency was left over from his unsuccessful re-election bid of 2018. He didn’t have much else to say, so I have no sense of what he might be referring to.

As I said, none of this is terribly important to anyone but me, but it might become so if Barrett carries off the political upset of the decade. In the meantime, remember to vote.