Candidate for
City Council Member; City of El Dorado Hills

C. (Curtis) Howell Ellerman was born in 1959 in Lancaster, Calfornia. A third-generation Californian, he was the first in his family to graduate from college. He obtained his bachelor's degree in political science from from Occidental College in 1981. He worked for the US Congress Offfice of Technology Assessment in Washington, D.C., and for the City of Glendale, California. While attending Loyola Law School in Los Angeles he served as director of the Coro Foundation, a prestigious graduate-level fellowship for future leaders in public service.

Howell graduated from Loyola with his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1986 with an emphasis on state and local government and land use law. An active member of the California Bar since that year, he built his own practice representing small businesses as well as serving as counsel for the Josephson Institute of Ethics (creator of the "Character Counts" ethics education program), where he helped draft the Alaska Legislative Ethics Act of 1989 and provided ethics training for the California State Legislature. He also served as general counsel of Occidental College.

At Occidental he was instrumental in preserving a number of historically significant buildings as well as developing a new master plan for the 100-year-old campus. He also served as president of the International Visitors Council of Los Angeles.

Howell is a graduate the Institute for Educational Management, Harvard University and he has taught college-level consitutional law, business law and real estate courses for over twelve years. In 2001 was one of 40 educational leaders worldwide invited to attend the Oxford Round Table on Education at Oxford University in England.

From 1997 to 2003 Howell served as Vice Chancellor of Human and Resource Development for Los Rios Community College District, overseeing the human resources and resource development for the 90,000-student district. During his tenure the District successfully passed the $265 million bond issue that is building Folsom Lake College and El Dorado Center. In 2003 he accepted a full-time professorship at Folsom Lake College, where he teaches business law and real estate law. His televised classes reach over a quarter million homes in Sacramento and El Dorado Counties. His wife, Jana, also an attorney, practices estate planning law in Cameron Park. They have five children and live in Marina Village, El Dorado Hills.

Howell's hobbies include collecting rare books from the American Revolutionary period. Among his most prized possessions are a first edition of the Federalist Papers and a second printing of the United States Constitution. For fun he likes to read, travel, lift weights and play tennis. He retired from golf after hitting a hole-in-one his first time on a regulation course in 1999.