Star Tribune
Former Ramsey County Commissioner and St. Paul City Council Member Janice Rettman has died
Janice Rettman probably wouldn’t like to see this obituary in the paper.
Despite more than three decades representing the North End of St. Paul and its surrounding areas in local government, she was an intensely private person, friends said, with strong convictions about what was right. She died after a short illness on Nov. 18 at 75.
“Basically, she represented Rice Street. And she represented people who have limited political power. And she fought for those people, and she didn’t forget about them,” said Joe Collins, who worked for Rettman earlier in her career and remained a friend.
Rettman had a tough childhood, growing up in Texas, a self-described “nondescript, dirt-poor kid.”
“She started working in the third grade, so she could eat,” Collins said. He said she later put herself through college at Abilene Christian University by working three jobs. She landed in the Midwest after serving in the program now known as AmeriCorps VISTA in Iowa.
Rettman spent more than a decade on the St. Paul City Council before she was elected to the Ramsey County Board, where she served from 1997 until she lost reelection in 2018.
On the City Council, Rettman helped St. Paul develop a strategy for demolishing vacant buildings, Collins said, making space for redevelopment.
On the county board, she was known as a workhorse who kept an eye on dollars and cents. In debates, she frequently found herself at odds with colleagues and often cast the lone “no” vote — including against pay raises for herself and colleagues.
She was instrumental in developing Ramsey County’s yard waste sites and helped stop a proposal to build a new Vikings Stadium in Arden Hills. Former Star Tribune columnist Joe Kimball nicknamed her “skunnel queen” for championing the connection between the St. Paul skyway system and Xcel Energy Center through a tunnel.
“That was Janice,” Collins said. “That was Janice pushing.”
Taking to the podium at her last meeting in 2018, Rettman addressed colleagues, staff and constituents. “I created my own set of values when I began to run, on the vision of democracy: Idealistic, realistic, optimistic, with a fiscal note,” she said.
Victoria Reinhardt, a longtime colleague on the county board, said she first learned of another of Rettman’s accomplishments while she was away at a conference and happened to catch an episode of “Forensic Files.”
“I heard Janice’s voice coming out of the TV,” she said. The episode covered the 1981 kidnapping and murder of Cassie Hansen, a 6-year-old who was abducted from a bathroom at a church in St. Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood.
Rettman had run across suspect Stuart Knowlton when she was the head of the St. Paul Housing Information Office. A housing resident had alleged Knowlton had made sexual advancements toward kids, according to “Forensic Files.”
According to the episode, Rettman volunteered to wear a wire and talk to Knowlton, asking him if he’d followed news about the Hansen case. During their conversation, Knowlton revealed a detail that hadn’t been made public about the murder, helping prosecutors make a breakthrough toward Knowlton’s conviction. Later she advocated against Knowlton’s release on parole, Collins said.
Rettman was known for loving her dogs, Tigger and Pilgrim. She also loved the music of Dolly Parton, said friend Linda Penrose, who along with Collins helped care for Rettman at the end of her life.
And she loved kids. Reinhardt recalled leaving her grandson, around age 3, with Rettman in her office when she had to step out. When Reinhardt came back, she found the two laughing on the floor, coloring with coloring books.
“I just cracked up and I went, ‘OK, well, I’m glad that you’re entertaining him,'” Reinhardt said. “And she said, ‘Oh, no, he’s entertaining me.'”
In her retirement, Rettman moved to Cambridge, where she built a home on a lake and enjoyed new adventures, including travel, plays and relaxation, Penrose said. Rettman continued to serve others through her local food shelf and her church, Open Range Cowboy Church in Ham Lake, where she was known as the “treat lady” for handing out goodies. “The kids swarmed to Janice every Sunday,” Penrose said.
A private celebration of life will be held at Rettman’s church, per her wishes, Penrose said.
Many residents in the apartments next to the proposed nightclub are visiting workers such as travel nurses or farm laborers, he said. “It makes no sense to have a nightclub that has concerts next to a place where people need to rest to work in the community,” Zuleger said.
He has said that the company also partners with addiction centers and women’s shelters to house Willmar’s most vulnerable residents, and some of these tenants would be too close for comfort to the new nightclub.
Instead of a nightclub, the site should be used for a Somali community center where children from the nearby apartments can play, Zuleger said. Willmar, a city of about 21,000 people, is about 24% Hispanic and 11% Black, with 16% of the city born overseas, double the average rate in the rest of Minnesota. About 43% of the company’s tenants are Somali, and Zuleger called them his “best-paying renters.”
But Doug Fenstra, the real estate agent helping sell the property at 951 High Av., said he had never heard about the possibility of a Somali community center before Zuleger brought up the idea at an October planning commission meeting.
On Wednesday, the planning commission deliberated whether a nightclub would fit the character of the neighborhood. They noted that there was already a brewery in the area.
They passed a motion granting the conditional-use permit.
“DHS and our state and federal partners have seen evidence that kickbacks are happening in Minnesota,” Inspector General Kulani Moti said in a statement. “That’s why we brought an anti-kickback proposal to the Minnesota Legislature last session. We will continue to work with the Legislature next session on ways to strengthen the integrity of our public programs.”
Nuway Alliance, one of the state’s largest nonprofit substance use disorder treatment providers, pays up to $700 a month for someone’s housing while they are in intensive outpatient treatment, the organization’s website states. The site lists dozens of sober housing programs clients can choose from.
Nuway leaders said they got an inquiry from the government about two and a half years ago indicating they are conducting a civil investigation into the housing model.
But officials with the nonprofit said in an email they believe what they are doing is legal and clients need it. More than 600 people are using their assistance to stay in recovery residences, Nuway officials stated. They said having a safe, supportive place to stay is particularly important for the vulnerable people they serve, more than half of whom reported being homeless in the six months before they started treatment.
Health plans knew about, approved and even lauded their program, Nuway leaders said, noting that health insurer UCare even gave it an award.
“The state of Minnesota has been fully aware of our program for a decade,” the organization said. “Since payors are fully aware of, and support the program, we struggle to see how anyone could argue it is improper, let alone fraudulent.”
Mounds View, the first Minnesota city to require homeowners to discharge racist language buried in deeds before they sell their homes, is celebrating a milestone: at least 100 homeowners have completed the process.
Officials say discharging the language is a symbolic step, but an important one.
“How could we call ourselves an inclusive community with the words ‘This home shall not be sold to a non-white person’ buried in the deeds?” Mayor Zach Lindstrom said at the state of the city address Monday.
Racially restrictive covenants, found in deeds around the Twin Cities and Minnesota, were legally enforceable tools of racial segregation for the first half of the 20th century. They barred homes’ sale to, and sometimes even occupancy by, anyone who wasn’t white until 1948, when they became unenforceable. Mapping Prejudice, a University of Minnesota research project uncovering these covenants, has found more than 33,000 of them in Minnesota, including more than 500 in Mounds View.
Many local cities have partnered with Just Deeds, a coalition that helps cities and their residents learn about and discharge covenants. In 2019, the Legislature passed a law allowing homeowners to add language to their deeds that discharges racist covenants but doesn’t erase them from the record. Earlier this year, Mounds View was the first to pass an ordinance requiring it. The city is also helping residents navigate the process.
Just because these covenants are no longer enforceable doesn’t mean they haven’t had long-lasting consequences, Kirsten Delegard, Mapping Prejudice project director, said at a Mounds View City Council meeting this summer: Minneapolis homes with racial covenants are worth 15% more than those without, she said. And neighborhoods with covenants remain the whitest parts of the Twin Cities.
Mounds View residents Rene and Steven Johnson were troubled to learn from Mapping Prejudice that their house, and many homes in their neighborhood, had racially restrictive covenants on them. It took some effort, including a trip to the Ramsey County Recorder’s Office, to find the document, which not only contained race restrictions but barred unmarried couples from owning the home.
The couple got their covenant discharged, and educated the city about the process, Rene Johnson said. That helped lead to the ordinance requiring covenants to be discharged before sale.
