A Bay Area councilman known to call some residents “delusional morons,” “malfeasant malcontents” and “miscreants” during public meetings has antagonized enough people in his city that he’s become the target of a recall campaign.

Fed up with his “bullying” and abrasive actions, a group of Foster City residents earlier this year hatched a plan to remove Foster City Vice Mayor Herb Perez from office and are now collecting recall signatures. Three of those signatures belong to Perez’s former council colleagues.

If the campaign succeeds, it will be only the second recall election involving San Mateo County elected officials in the past two decades. The last one took place in 2013 when voters kicked off three members of the Coastside Fire Protection District board.

Perez was first elected to the City Council in 2011 and re-elected in 2015. Although his term expires December 2020, some residents say his exit cannot come soon enough.

Critics say although Perez has always been brash he’s gotten more so while becoming the longest serving council member. Fearing he could become mayor next year, they decided to mobilize.

“We just can’t have him leading our city and being an example to our children anymore,” said Jeff Regan, one of the residents leading the recall effort.

The petition cites a variety of reasons to recall him, such as “a lack of commitment (poor attendance), ignoring the concerns and wishes of the community, failure to protect Foster City from over-development, and open disdain for residents.”

Perez contests those generalizations, although he does readily admit being direct, especially when he feels the need to correct inaccurate statements made at council meetings.

Accused in an email of displaying “greed” over “good sense” and lacking civility, Perez wrote back: “Had I truly been uncivil you would have known and it would have been direct, purposeful and left a meaningful impact on your sense of self,” according to an email obtained by a resident through a Freedom for Information Act request.

“When someone comes up and threatens the council, makes misstatements of facts or accuses us of taking money from developers, being in the back pocket of developers or stealing from the city, then I responded appropriately,” Perez said in a recent interview.

Among Perez’s critics and petition signers are former council members Gary Pollard, Pam Frisella and Steve Okamoto — who said he opted not to run for a second term because he was tired of the way Perez intimidated and bullied him and city staff.

“He hasn’t done anything criminal that you’ll find in a law book, but it’s criminal in the way that he treats people,” Frisella said in a recent interview. “As a council member, you’re held to a higher standard. Yelling back at people is not your role. Your role is to diffuse it.”

At a meeting in March 2016, for instance, Perez told residents who complained about things but didn’t do anything to fix them he would “place (their concerns) where I place most of those complaints.” He then proceeded to crumple up a sheet of paper and throw it at a garbage can.

“That’s not how it should be,” former Councilmember Pollard said in a recent interview. “As a resident, you shouldn’t feel afraid or intimidated to come before the council if you disagree with something.”

Perez counters that many of his blunt comments have been a reaction to attacks from residents who have stalked him at his house and business, urged people to boycott his business and spewed lies including that he works on behalf of developers. The onslaught forced him to stop using his city-issued email address about a month ago, he said.

“There are times when it’s so overwhelming,” he said, choking up. “It’s wrong — all of it. Just be true, be honest.”

Perez has his defenders as well.

Former councilman Charlie Bronitsky, who opposes the recall, said he — like Perez — faced unfounded accusations he was in the “back pocket of developers.”

In actuality, the council has only taken a couple of votes on big developments in the past eight years, and in one of them Perez recused himself because he owned a business in the property under question. In the other vote, his was one of three in favor of a project.

“I’m not gonna say Herb can’t be pretty vicious in his attacks at times,” Bronitsky said. “But I’ve never seen him take a position that I felt like he was looking out for himself rather than the community as a whole.”

Foster City Mayor Sam Hindi said disliking someone shouldn’t be grounds for a recall.

“The biggest disservice with this recall effort is discouraging good people from actually running for public office because no one would want to put themselves in such a position,” he said.

Residents leading the recall effort are pushing their campaign from multiple angles. Among other complaints, they allege Perez disregarded common protocol when he voted for Hindi to become mayor and took the vice mayor seat to try to become mayor in 2020, uses his seat on the council to further his business operations and pushes a pro-development agenda.

When asked about each claim, Perez shot them down quickly — just like on his website fctruth.com.

He has “zero interest” in being mayor and the mayor and vice mayor seats were chosen as they always are — by a full council vote. “I was already mayor and I corrected everything I needed to correct when I was mayor,” he said.

Second, he and his business, Gold Medal Center Martial Arts, are a prominent sponsor for city events such as Summer Days, Neighbor Nights and Movie in the Park because he donates the most money. “Sponsorships are open to anyone who write checks,” he said. “And in the past, I’ve been the only business willing to write checks.”

As for development, his voting record shows he is not for or against it. “This is a group that is vehemently opposed to development and quite frankly their anger is misplaced,” Perez said.

Some members of a group called Foster City Residents for Responsible Development have joined the effort to recall Perez, saying that removing him from office would be one way to protect their community from over-development.

While some residents have compared Perez’s lack of civil discourse to that of President Donald Trump, he in turn accuses them of using “Trump-like tactics” to gather support for their recall effort.

“They’re lying and misrepresenting the facts. That’s what they do,” Perez said. “These are people with little social responsibility, little concern for the truth and personal agendas.”

Recall organizers are now three weeks into the signature gathering stage, in which they need to obtain 20 percent of the city’s 16,565 registered voters, or 3,313. To get a measure on the March 2020 ballot, they must collect the required signatures by the end of September.

The county estimates a recall measure would cost Foster City taxpayers about $70,000 for a consolidated March 2020 election and up to about $300,000 for a special election, according to Priscilla Tam, the city’s communications director.