In her 30 years on the Ramsey County Board of Commissioners and the St. Paul City Council, Janice Rettman became known for her frugality, often casting the sole “no” vote on the county board against major public initiatives such as the county’s purchase of the Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant in Arden Hills.

At the same time, she embraced public transit and affordable housing efforts, serving for years as chair of a regional initiative to launch a second round-trip Amtrak train between St. Paul and Chicago.

Ramsey County Commissioner Janice Rettman, center, greets voters at Roseville Area High School on Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2018, during DFL precinct caucuses. (Callie Schmidt / Pioneer Press)

“A ‘no’ vote is sometimes absolutely a ‘yes’ vote for the people,” said Rettman, in her signature Texas drawl, explaining to a reporter in 2017 that her commitment to saving every penny of tax dollars she could was intended to tamp down property tax increases for vulnerable homeowners. “It’s about service to people.”

It would be her last year in office. On Tuesday, Ramsey County Board Chair Trista Martinson announced that Rettman, a longtime resident of St. Paul’s Como area, had died last week at the age of 75. No further information was immediately available about the cause of death.

Work with the city of St. Paul

Rettman ran the city’s former housing information office in the 1970s and spent nearly 11 years as a St. Paul City Council member before joining the county board in April 1997.

Once considered a reformer in the male-dominated political circles of the 1980s, Rettman found herself trailing Martinson — a self-described progressive — heavily in the August 2017 political primary. She lost to Martinson that November.

Asked about her famous frugality, Rettman once recalled how as a little girl growing up in southern Texas, she didn’t always have enough money to pay for school lunch. Students teased her about her clothes, and the teasing only intensified when a lunch monitor took pity and allowed her to complete menial tasks around the cafeteria to earn her meals.

While other kids lunched, she worked. With 10 minutes to spare at the end of her shift, she ate her food.

Commitment to frugality

Those memories informed her contrarian commitment to frugality in both her personal and professional lives. Long after the advent of email and smart phones, Rettman insisted the only way to catch her on the fly was through her beeper, which allowed her to save on mobile minutes.

Hearing that her critics were calling themselves more “progressive” both amused and rankled her, given the hard-fought social justice and environmental battles she waged across decades for affordable housing. As a city council member in the late 1980s, Rettman embraced a controversial “Public Accommodations” ordinance that barred housing discrimination based on race or gender.

“The thing of it is, housing is a right, period,” said Rettman in 2017. “I knew whichever way I voted, there was going to be some people who were hell-bent on voting me out.”

In the course of her 30 years in office, she became known as a doyenne of Rice Street, befriending the patrons at the Tin Cup’s bar and restaurant as she found funding to keep playgrounds open or turn on alley lights. When the county board approved its own pay increases each year, Rettman would often cast the sole “no” vote. And when the board voted to approve a $1 million modernization of county offices, Rettman again voted “no.”

“We’ve got a lot of other items that could use $1 million, including the taxpayers in their wallet,” she explained at the time, having pulled over into a parking lot to return a reporter’s call to her pager.

John Kaul, a retired lobbyist at the State Capitol, noted Rettman’s thriftiness on budget matters.

“She had a deserved reputation as being tighter than a snare drum when it came to any kind of spending,” said Kaul, in a written remembrance shared with friends on Tuesday. “She didn’t follow the pack and asked a lot of tough questions about any matter before the board and did watch every penny,” Kaul said.

Funeral arrangements have yet to be made public.

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