A day in the life of a plain-spoken resident angry over local
decision-making
Ellen Newman isn’t what you’d call a big cheese in town.
She doesn’t belong to Rotary, doesn’t have a 100-year-old family
box seat at the annual Saddle Horse Show, doesn’t belong to the
Native Daughters of the Golden West and her family didn’t become
part of the county’s founding fathers after surviving a
hair-raising winter in the Sierras before the Gold Rush of
1849.
A day in the life of a plain-spoken resident angry over local decision-making
Ellen Newman isn’t what you’d call a big cheese in town.
She doesn’t belong to Rotary, doesn’t have a 100-year-old family box seat at the annual Saddle Horse Show, doesn’t belong to the Native Daughters of the Golden West and her family didn’t become part of the county’s founding fathers after surviving a hair-raising winter in the Sierras before the Gold Rush of 1849.
In fact, Newman’s family was in this country long before all that. The 80-year-old Hollister resident is a Native American from the Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma.
Newman has lived in Hollister since 1981 and her modest home is one of the low-income units in Park Street Apartments off McCray on the east side.
Living on a Social Security check of $850 a month, she may not have the means to threaten a lawsuit against “corruption,” but as the saying goes: she’s mad as hell, and she’s not going to take it anymore.
“It’s going to hit everybody,” she said, speaking with a reporter in her tiny but white-glove tidy apartment.
Newman was talking, of course, of the sewage rate hike recently passed unanimously by the Hollister City Council, necessary to pay for a new $120 million wastewater treatment facility. Rates will go up from $31 a month to $124 a month over the next three years.
“And those b——- want to give the OK to build those million-dollar homes above San Juan and say it’s going to benefit the community,” Newman added. “Like s— it is.”
And that was in reference to the San Juan Vista Estates project far outside of the Hollister city limits.
“The whole goddamn crew should go, council and supervisors,” Newman said. “They sure as hell give themselves hefty raises all the time. They sit on their asses and they don’t listen to us when we said we didn’t want it.
“This town has become a mini Washington, DC,” she observed.
She may be considered a “very low income” resident, but local elected officials would be imprudent to ignore her. She can’t get around too easily; she tools around on an electric chair scooter to Safeway and her doctor’s offices or takes a bus to Salinas when Social Security is giving her a hassle. But she watches every government meeting on CMAP TV like a hawk.
And then, at least once a week, she makes phone calls to council members or supervisors, depending on which entity angers her most.
“Oh, I call them all the time,” she said.
She also happens to have an MBA in economics. Newman worked as a bank loan officer for 50 years. Such was her dedication and aptitude in the field, her bank bosses paid for her college education when she was younger.
So when she watches the TV in horror as council members or supervisors raise a tax or compliment each other on the hard work they’ve done, Newman wants to go on a genuine warpath.
“They’re all unscrupulous a–holes on the city and county seats,” she says flatly, speaking above the din of her ever-chattering police scanner crackling in the background. “I call them [council members and supervisors] all the time, and I talk to them just like I am talking to you.”
Newman obviously doesn’t mince words, but the saltiness she liberally applies to her no-nonsense vocabulary seems quite natural. When listening to her commentary, one readily feels this wise soul has earned the right to prattle on in this spicy dialect. After all, she explained, Vice President Dick Cheney talked similarly to Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont on the Senate Floor when the VP told the veteran statesman “to go [copulate] with himself.”
One can’t help but be reminded of another plain speaking and savvy Hollister resident when talking with Newman: the much-missed former District 3 Supervisor Rita Bowling. So it is not surprising the two are old acquaintances.
Newman belongs to that often overlooked economic class of single seniors and hard-working stiffs eking out a skinny living.”
She believes the nation is hurtling backwards toward a time of vast economic inequities, and symbolically likens Hollister to a bowling trophy that serves as a garish hood ornament atop the unstoppable Rolls Royce of economic class bigotry. She believes the nation is losing its middle class and that polarization between rich and poor becomes more entrenched with every session of Congress … and every Hollister City Council meeting.
“It’s a dead community,” she offered. “There’s nothing here for anybody. Nothing for the kids. And they want to build that Pulte Home project for rich old people over by the airport? They’re not going to be putting any money here in this dead place. They’ll all be shopping in Gilroy.”
Newman is mystified as to “why in hell” the battered women’s shelter is still not open to this day.
“It’s been sitting there waiting for eight years for donations to open,” she said. “Why don’t they put that service in the damn budget, both city and county?”
The plain talking firebrand is quick to explain that hardships such as a huge sewage rate hike won’t affect her – at least not immediately – because her low rent is fixed and the water, sewage and garbage bills are included in the cost. But she worries about her other senior friends who don’t have the same arrangement. The great-grandmother is especially concerned for her two daughters. One also lives in town with her own family and the other lives in Nevada.
“Everybody has to keep their nose to the grindstone because of these a–holes,” Newman explains. “If they had got on this sewage facility when they were supposed to, we could have had it for one-third of the price. They’re nothing but a bunch of scroungy bums, redneck fat a–es.”
One of Newman’s sons-in-law now must work in Fresno because he is in the construction business, and the gasoline he uses takes up a major chunk of his paycheck. There’s not much construction occurring in Hollister these days because of the building moratorium mandated by inadequate sewage treatment capacity.
On Tuesday Newman was taking care of her sick grandson, Dakota, while his parents worked.
“It’s the other people I’m fighting for,” she said. “People think they don’t have any power, like when these bastards give themselves raises. Bulls—! I don’t care how busy people are. It’s our job to get on them.”
Newman survives on her paltry income by counting every penny and cutting corners on any costs she can. A friend of hers wears almost the same size clothing and gives her hand-me-downs. She cuts coupons, takes advantage of low-income programs offered by PG&E and shops at the dollar store down the street.
She gets cheap medications because of Medicare, but can’t afford all prescribed to her. So she did some research and figured she could get the same essential ingredient in one of her prescriptions also found in acidophilus milk.
She grows a few vegetables – what she can in such a small yard – to supplement her groceries.
“I lived through the Depression and that taught me a lot,” she said. “But I think we’re headed there again. I think that will be (President) Bush’s October Surprise. This town’s going to go belly-up, and then the developers are going to come in and build their mansions and everyone else will go.”
Newman believes a new law should be enacted in the local ordinances that automatically expel elected leaders “when they screw up.” It’s called “the 3-D rule” in banking, she says, and the second runner up in an election then gets the job. If that person blows it, she explained, it goes to the next runner-up, or the one with the better resume.
“This isn’t all their fault,” she said, speaking of our elected leaders. “It’s the public’s fault, really. You get what you vote for.”
