McGuire Touts Legislative Experience in Bid For Ramsey County Board

It’s been a tough year for Mary Jo McGuire.

This spring, legislative redistricting stuck her in same geographic territory as Roseville Sen. John Marty, and she lost to him in the District 66 DFL endorsing convention.

But McGuire decided she wasn’t done with public service and is running for a seat on the Ramsey County Board, using her long history as a lawmaker to appeal to voters. Ramsey County District 2 includes Roseville, New Brighton, Lauderdale, Little Canada, precinct 4 of Mounds View and the Ramsey County portion of St. Anthony.

"I have experience and investment in this community already, and I know that the work on the board will be the kind of work that I’ve been doing in the past,” she said.

First elected to the House in 1988, she served until 2002, focusing on education—especially early childhood through higher education—violence prevention and public health. After the House, she took a decade-long break from public life, teaching at St. Kate’s and working with social studies teachers on civic education, before being elected to the state Senate in a special election in 2011.

McGuire said that, as a lawmaker, she gained experience working with Ramsey County, including authoring of a bill in the 1990s that gave grant money to counties for violence prevention.

McGuire said she has campaigned for Ramsey County Board with door knocking, community events and phone calls and has often fielded the question from voters of what exactly it is that the board does.

“The main issue is to balance the work a county board does, which is to implement state and federal policy (and we do libraries and parks and roads), with the residents’ ability to pay,” she said.

McGuire said she would use her experience as a lawmaker to try to force the state government into paying for its mandates so that the county would not need to raise taxes.

“We don’t want to force people out of their home by making property taxes high,” she said. “We have to keep property taxes low, while still providing the services.”

McGuire is a lifelong resident of Ramsey County. She attended high school at Alexander Ramsey Senior High School in Roseville (now Roseville Area High School), and lived in Falcon Heights until, in response to redistricting, she moved six months ago down the street to Roseville.

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