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John Rodgers Featured in DNJ

November 20th, 2009 - Nearing the end of his second term on the Rutherford County Commission, Murfreesboro attorney John Rodgers remains in the thick of the action, even though he will not seek re-election in 2010 for a third term.A longtime member of the commission's Health and Education Committee, he is proud of the progress the county's school system has made over the last seven years.

"We've built a number of schools in that time, and we consistently receive excellent reports from the state on meeting federal and state guidelines on the way we educate our kids," Rodgers said.

And as chairman of the commission's, Steering, Legislative and Governmental Affairs Committee, Rodgers is a key figure in developing an in-house legal department. He sat down last week with The DNJ to discuss commission matters.

Q: The County Commission is going through the process of creating an in-house legal department after years of contracting with Jim Cope and his office. Why do you feel that change is necessary?

Rodgers: The process of transitioning to in-house legal services started about two years ago when we renewed Jim's contract then, and there was a desire on the part of the full commission and certainly on the part of the steering committee to look at the way legal services are provided to us. At that time, we formed the subcommittee to gather information, look at how much we were paying, what the county attorney was responsible for, and bring forward some recommendation to the steering committee to look at.

Over two years, off and on, more so here in the last six months than before, we were gathering that information and looking at the cost versus benefit. I think it started to become clear that in-house was certainly going to be an option for us, and there were many reasons that was going to be option for us, maybe even a preferred option.
We are really excited about the prospect of having someone that is solely dedicated to the business of Rutherford County. When the county was smaller, a part-time county attorney made sense, but now the county has enough legal business to keep not just one county attorney busy full time, but more than that. So it's simply time to put people in place that are dedicated to the county, that we're not competing for time with (other clients), so that was a pretty compelling.

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