Ventura City Council District 3

Gaston is competing against Barbara Brown and Mike Johnson. William Cornell is nominally running but doesn’t seem to have a serious campaign.

Gaston is the pro-housing option. In his website, he demonstrated support for homeless shelters:

Ventura has taken a step in the right direction with ARCH, our new year-round shelter, and I would continue to support projects like this and others that address homelessness.

And in the Midtown Community Council forum, Gaston’s leading statement focused on the housing crisis, calling for affordable homes, moderate homes, and executive homes. In the forum he also supported infill projects to reduce traffic, supported density,and called for reducing the power of design review committee and historic preservation committee, which can often block projects.

Brown offers the starkest contrast to Gaston on housing. In the forum, she didn’t include housing in her list of top three priorities. She said of Ventura residents, “They don’t want large developments, don’t want three-, four-, five-, six- story developments.” She was also the fiercest advocate for retaining the historic and design review committees, and she’s endorsed by Distrinct 2 NIMBY incumbent Christy Weir.

Johnson sits in between Brown and Gaston. His website disparaged state housing bills like SB 330, but he also supported streamlining, fee reduction, and infill development. In the candidate forum, his number-2 priority was “more housing, market rate and affordable,” and number-3 was homelessness. He supported preserving the design review and historic preservation committees, but potentially reducing their power to block projects. However, he’s endorsed by the NIMBY group Ventura Citizens for Hillside Preservation (which also endorsed Christy Weir).

Beyond his housing views, Gaston has experience in the technology field, which would bring new needed perspective on growing Ventura’s economy with new firms like the successful TheTradeDesk.