Ramsey County Histori — Summer 1999: “Two Who Were There Remember: How Ramsey County’s Governance Moved into the 20th Century”

Two Who Were There Remember: How Ramsey County’s Governance Moved into the 20th Century

Author: Thomas J. Kelley

When the author took office as Ramsey County auditor in January 1967, county governance had remained “virtually unchanged” for 50 years. This is an account of the reason why the earlier form of county governance, which was deliberately fragmented by law, needed to change to stay abreast of the population growth and other needs of Ramsey County. The goal was to modernize and streamline county government to better meet the needs of the citizenry. The author was one of the leaders in the effort to persuade people in county government and at the Minnesota Legislature to make the needed changes and to strengthen county administration. Included in this article is a long sidebar written by Judge John T. Finley with his recollections of this reform effort of the early 1970s. Most of these changes were implemented between 1971 and 1975 and they “moved Ramsey County from a nineteenth-century operation into the 1970s.”

PDF of Kelley & Finley article