Victoria Reinhardt steps down from Ramsey County Board after 28 years

The trash queen is taking her final bow. Ramsey County Commissioner Victoria Reinhardt will retire Jan. 7 from the post she’s held for 28 years.

Now 71 and a proud grandmother, she told her county board colleagues that she plans to spend more time with her family.

First elected in 1996, the White Bear Lake resident went on to build a career in Ramsey County that focused on reinvesting in county buildings, libraries, transportation and, most of all, finding a better way to manage the tons of trash created here.

“I love garbage,” she said in an interview. “I know that sounds strange, but this is one area that every single person has an impact on. What you do, what you buy, what you reuse, everything you do makes a difference.”

Her colleagues made jokes about her love of trash years ago, said county board colleague Rafael Ortega, but the label became a badge of honor as Reinhardt helped oversee significant changes in the way the county handles trash, recycling and compost.

“When Victoria first came on the board, we faced a lot of issues,” Ortega said at Reinhardt’s last board meeting. “I’m going to miss you.”

Her career in local government wasn’t a given when she started out. Married at 18 to a man who became abusive, Reinhardt was pregnant a year later with the first of two sons. She says now that she had low self-esteem and didn’t go straight to college after high school despite being a National Honor Society student at Hastings.

Determined to get an education, she eventually took the only class that fit her schedule, one on renewable energy at what was then Lakewood Community College (now Century College). As her enthusiasm for the subject grew, Reinhardt found a new direction.

She landed a legislative aide job for the former Ramsey County Commissioner Bob Orth, and he was the one who recognized the signs of domestic abuse, she said. Reinhardt was connected to an Amherst H. Wilder Foundation program for domestic abuse survivors.

“That saved my life and it saved my sons’ lives,” she said.

Given a second chance, Reinhardt dove into her education while working full-time and raising two boys. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Metro State in St. Paul and a doctorate in public administration in 2007 from Hamline University.

Her first husband died in 2010. Reinhardt married James Patrick Barone in 1991.

Trista Martinson, a former Ramsey County Board member who became a close friend of Reinhardt’s, said Reinhardt’s strength was her ability to bring people together. “She’s no-nonsense, but she’s compassionate and caring and she’s willing to go the distance,” she said.

Reinhardt will leave office as the county pursues one of her latest initiatives: an anaerobic digester for food scraps that would make the county one of just a few places in the country that runs a large digester.

“She’s going out as strong as she came in,” said Martinson, who now runs the Ramsey/Washington Recycling & Energy Center.

The person who worked most closely with Reinhardt over the years, her policy aide Darren Tobolt, said her gift as a commissioner was to be a good listener.

“She’s really good at finding the way forward in a disagreement,” said Tobolt, who recently took a new job in Dakota County.

The county was in rough shape when she first took office, Reinhardt said. The jail was in poor condition and had been decertified. It rained in the county’s public works building.

“There were a lot of things that just had not been looked after,” she said.

The county board was filled with fresh faces, Reinhardt said, and the group made a list of priorities for repair and renovation and got to work. A new Ramsey County Jail opened in 2003 at 425 Grove St.; the public works department was moved to a new building in Arden Hills around the same time.

Her career spanned numerous county projects over the years, from renovations at Ramsey County libraries in White Bear Lake, Roseville and Maplewood to the ambitious Rice Creek Commons project in Arden Hills where plans call for redeveloping the former Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant into a mix of residential and commercial neighborhoods built around a town center.

It’s the kind of ambitious project Reinhardt likes to point to when she says the Ramsey County Board is “a board of action.”

“We don’t just talk about something,” she said.

Her largest role came about when a private trash facility came up for sale. The county had already partnered with Washington County on trash issues, and in 2017 Reinhardt pushed the counties to jointly purchase the facility in Newport.

The Ramsey/Washington Recycling & Energy Center has been upgraded with new technology to recycle organics. The new compost collection program is still rolling out in Ramsey County, and those food scraps will eventually go to the anaerobic digester to be converted into biogas and biochar, a soil amendment.

Reinhardt, looking back on her career, said she’s surprised by it. At a high school reunion, some of her former classmates said they would have considered her the least likely person to run for public office.

An introvert who’s shy by nature, Reinhardt said she cared about the work, and that drove her to speak up.

“I would have never thought I would be there for 28 years.”