‘I was very proud to be the mayor.’ Ritter steps down after a quarter-century on Vista council

A couple of months out of office and with the holidays behind her, Judy Ritter is hitting the gym again and thinking of taking some real estate courses to brush up on her career skills.

But after serving on the Vista City Council for more than two decades and being elected mayor three times, attending more city meetings is not on her immediate to-do list.

“I don’t know if they want to hear from me,” she said, adding that she might consider attending a council meeting “if something really bothers me.”

“Right now, I can’t think of anything I want to talk about,” she said. “I’ll just let them feel their way through and see where they’re going with stuff.”

Ritter was elected to the City Council in 1998, elected mayor in 2010 and re-elected to the seat in 2014 and 2018. She did not seek re-election, finally retiring from local politics shortly before turning 79 in December.

Her tenure marked a period of revitalization in the city, including the expansion of the Vista Business Park, improvements to Moonlight Amphitheater, three new fire stations, two skateboard parks, Vista Sports Park and a rebirth of the city’s historic downtown.

Vista also became a charter city, collaborated with neighboring cities in Innovate 78, created a homeless master plan, updated its general plan and increased emergency reserves to 29 percent.

While council members didn’t always agree, Ritter credits cooperation among council members with accomplishing such goals as improvements to Paseo Santa Fe, an ambitious six-year, $30 million project that revitalized a once-blighted street.

“It took the determination of different councils,” she said of the project, one of many that had been planned for the downtown area over 20 years. “Everybody agreed it needed to be done. It was actually through 12 different councils because every two years somebody would go off and somebody new would come on. But even though we all didn’t agree on things, we kept the same focus, especially on that project.

“I was very proud to be the mayor when it got finished,” she said. “I think it’s very cool.”

It was the type of city improvement she may have had in mind when she decided to run for the City Council.

“I originally ran for the City Council when my kids were in high school,” she said. “As they were going away to college, I wanted them to come back to Vista, because I wanted my grandkids here. I wanted Vista to be a place where they would be proud to call home and they would come back to and maybe get a job here.

“So I ran to make Vista a place that they would be proud to come back to and say, ‘I’m from Vista.’”

Ritter had moved to San Diego County from her hometown of Lansing, Michigan, with her then-husband in 1971. The couple, who had three daughters together, originally settled in Oceanside but were unhappy with the constant coastal overcast.

“I’d call my friends over here (in Vista) and my brother-in-law, and I’d say, ‘What are you doing?’ They’d say, ‘I’m sitting by the pool. It’s nice and sunny. So I moved to Vista because the weather was better.”

Ritter worked at a bakery and a publication that reported on courtroom trial outcomes before taking a job in 1976 with Jazzercise, leading exercise classes to music 10 times a week.

“We used to be like DJs,” she recalled about the early days of the company. “In every class there would be 15 or 20 songs, and they were singles so you’d flip them. It was an interesting life I had, but I loved it.”

Long before CDs and digital downloads, Ritter would go to record stores in search of songs picked by Jazzercise founder Judi Sheppard Missett, but she often couldn’t find the records she sought because other instructors already had bought them.

Ritter made a pitch to Missett. For an extra $5 a month, she would buy records for all Jazzercise instructors, which led to her forming Jazzercise Records. The exercise company continued to grow, and Ritter eventually was buying music for about 5,500 instructors internationally.

“It was one of those ideas that you start, and it grew into a big, huge business,” she said.

Ritter also started her own gym, Courthouse Fitness Club, which she ran from 1992 to 2000.

“It was a fun thing to do, but at that time I was running fast, teaching 10 classes a week and running the music business, which was super busy,” she said. “And then I got elected.”

Ritter recalled going to bed on election night and waking up to a call telling her she had won.

“I thought, ‘What have I done?’” she said. “I was already working until midnight a lot of nights just to keep up with stuff, and then I had another job.”

Ritter sold the gym and her Jazzercise music business to focus on her work with the city, but realized the job didn’t pay enough, so she went into real estate.

Over the years, Ritter grew from a political novice to one of the longest-serving elected leaders in North County. The city’s politics and society itself has changed in that time, and Ritter wasn’t always eager to embrace the new.

She originally opposed cannabis dispensaries, which she feared could bring crime to the city and compared them to bail-bond and check-cashing businesses. Instead, they brought a surprising amount of tax dollars to Vista, and Ritter said she has no complaints about the businesses so far.

She strongly opposed the City Council’s decision to change the city manager’s hiring authority, which led to the resignation of then-City Manager Patrick Johnson last year.

“It’s probably one of the strongest things I’ve ever disagreed with,” she said. “I’m OK if it’s for a reason, and I know you can’t always get your way and there’s a compromise, but in this case there was nothing.”

Ritter also cautioned the council about its decision to fly a Progressive Flag at the Civic Center during Pride Month last June. While she joined the council in unanimous support for it, Ritter said she had concerns because other groups might ask future councils for their flags to be flown at the center since a precedent had been set.

“I think because they’re a young council, they don’t think about how their decisions are going to affect the future,” she said.

But the future is in their hands, and Ritter said her age influenced her decision to not seek re-election.

“I didn’t want to be an 80-year-old council member,” she said. “Even though I’m the only one who had the history, we were at a point where the younger people really weren’t listening. They really didn’t want to hear the history. And it’s not just here. I think the nation is kind of going through things now. It’s the young people. They need to make their way.”

Ritter sees success in her original goals for running for office. She does believe Vista is a great place to live, and her family members did stick around.

While one of her daughters lives in Michigan and another in Tokyo, her daughter Tera and her two children and pet dog live at home with Ritter, along with the mayor’s two mastiffs.