Sen. Seymour Campaigns in County : Politics: Lawmaker touts anti-gang bill, but some Ventura residents are upset their area is used as an example of the problem.

In a campaign sweep Friday through Ventura County, U.S. Sen. John Seymour toured “gang hangouts” near Ventura Avenue on foot with law-enforcement officials to tout his proposed $100-million anti-gang bill.

Even before Seymour’s arrival, some tension was evident among waiting community leaders, who work daily to keep youths out of gangs in the Ventura Avenue area.

They bristled slightly at the Seymour campaign branding their Ventura neighborhood a “gang hangout” in a news release, but said they were glad for any help they could get to turn youths away from joining street gangs.

“It’s not a gang hangout,” Roberta Payan, city coordinator of anti-gang activities, told a Seymour aide.

“You’re not going to have a lot of gang members kicking it out here at 2:30. They’re all at work,” said Payan, who also runs the neighborhood’s Westpark Community Center. “I’ve got 40 kids working for me . . . and if they get involved in any criminal activity, I kick them out of the program. It’s a neighborhood here; it’s a community. It’s not a gang.”

Seymour pulled up half an hour late, after meeting privately with Ventura Police Chief Richard Thomas and Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury. He arrived in an unmarked police cruiser with Assistant Dist. Atty. Colleen Toy White and Ventura Police Sgt. Carl Handy, who runs his department’s anti-gang task force.

Seymour hopped out and shadowboxed with two neighborhood children, who would not play along, and wrung the hand of Mayor Gregory L. Carson, who introduced the senator to Payan.

“I’ve heard great things about you,” Seymour told Payan, who gave him a Westpark T-shirt.

With two uniformed patrolmen as bodyguards and a Ventura police Windbreaker on his back, Seymour walked about 200 feet on Ramona Street and chatted for about 15 minutes with Payan, Handy and a few neighborhood children.

“I was gang-active myself,” Payan told the senator. “Then I got out and went to school, and came back to the ‘hood.”

Payan outlined some of the gang-intervention programs she now runs, including the work program at Westpark and a parenting class that has been slow getting started because of a lack of participation.

Seymour remarked on the near-absence of any graffiti along that stretch of Ramona Street, prompting Payan to point to the mural on the side of the Westside Market, painted by some of her charges.

Then Seymour outlined his bill, due to be introduced within a week in the Senate.

The bill would toughen penalties for convicted gang members, boost the number of gang-crime investigators, beef up grants for gang intervention and open boot camps for nonviolent offenders, Seymour said. The programs would be funded by criminal assets forfeited to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

“Admittedly, it’s not going to solve the gang problem, but it will provide some very basic services. . . . Thank you. You are doing a super job,” Seymour told Payan, before leaving to address Republican businesswomen in Oxnard, where he slammed the campaign of Democratic challenger Dianne Feinstein.

After Seymour left, neighborhood children gathered around Steve Padilla, coach of a teen-agers’ boxing club at Westpark Community Center, who also met with Seymour.

“Why did he come here?” one child asked. “How come he picked the Avenue?”

“He’s a U.S. senator,” Padilla said. “He came to see where the gangs are.”

“He should’ve gone over to Bell Way,” a neighboring street where more gang members actually hang out, another said.

Asked to evaluate Seymour’s visit, Padilla said: “I don’t want to say anything negative. I don’t know if it’s just campaigning or not. . . . There’s a fine line between a community and a gang-infested area.”

“I’ll say this, though, it’s the first time someone’s done that,” Padilla said of the national politician’s visit. “I respect the man for coming out and looking.”

In Oxnard, Seymour spoke to about 60 Republican businesswomen and a handful of men at Casa Sirena Resort Hotel. Seymour outlined his support for a woman’s right to choose abortion, the North American Free Trade Agreement and tighter controls on the U.S.-Mexico border.

But the speech, the latest in a series of Seymour summits with Republican women in his attempt to defuse the “gender issue” between him and Democrat Dianne Feinstein, focused mostly on his opponent.

“I’m getting a little tired of Dianne Feinstein saying I should vote for her based on gender only,” Seymour said. “That is silly. It’s as silly as me coming into a roomful of men and saying, ‘Guys, you oughta vote for me ‘cause I’m male.”