Retooling legal staffing for colleges OK’d

Monday, Aug. 23, 2004 | 9:48 a.m.

RENO -- Interim Chancellor Jim Rogers says he hopes to hire a new chief counsel within the next two to three weeks under a reshuffling of the legal staff of the University and Community College System of Nevada.

Rogers said he has had two or three telephone calls from people interested in the job, estimated to pay about $150,000, but so far no formal applications have been received.

"No deal has been made" to hire anybody for the Las Vegas-based position, Rogers told the regents Friday. "I don't have them standing in line, but I hope to have good, qualified applicants in two weeks."

The board agreed to Rogers' plan to hire a chief counsel and send the present attorneys in the central offices to represent the individual campuses. The plan would place one lawyer at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and another one at the University of Nevada, Reno. The Community College of Southern Nevada and Nevada State College in Henderson would share an attorney.

The chief counsel would oversee the lawyers in the field.

Regent Marcia Bandera of Elko was the only one who was against the plan.

This was the third item in which Rogers prevailed in the two-day meeting of the regents at the Western Nevada Community College.

The board voted 7-6 to allow Rogers to hire his executive staff, such as vice chancellors and the chief counsel, without getting approval of the regents. And regents voted 8-3 to accept Rogers' suggested settlement of an open meeting complaint with Attorney General Brian Sandoval.

While there was some dissent, Rogers had a majority of the 13 members of the board behind him in his plans to restructure the system.

Rogers wants his own attorney, answerable to him and not the regents. But if there is a conflict, he said the new chief counsel will report to the regents.

Under the present structure, Tom Ray is general counsel and has a staff that works in the central office. Ray, who was not at the regents' meetings, will be assigned to one of the schools. Brooke Nielsen, assistant general counsel, attended the Thursday and Friday meetings in Ray's place.

Rogers' plan for attorneys got the support of UNLV President Carol Harter, who said the university now pays part of the cost for the central office of attorneys. She said a lawyer may be working on a case for UNLV one day but then he is assigned another case and is in court and can't be reached. "It's dysfunctional that you don't have a person in your shop," she said.

The chief counsel, Rogers said, will do "what Tom Ray did" plus have outside relationships with the community."

The central legal staff has been involved recently fighting with Sandoval over violations of the open meeting law.

Rogers said the most troublesome issue he has encountered since taking over several months ago is the relationship between the system and the public at large.

"We have done a bad job in making the public feel comfortable" Rogers told the regents.

He added he has been meeting frequently with the attorney general to clear up the problems over open-meeting law violations.

"It's essential we make peace with the attorney general," Rogers said. With that he presented the board with the proposed settlement with Sandoval over an appeal in the Nevada Supreme Court, which the regents approved.

Voting against the settlement were Derby, Bandera and Kirkpatrick.

"After we settle this case we can develop regulations on the open meeting law," Rogers said. "Only God knows what the open meeting law means."

Nobody understand when a discussion by a board ends and deliberations towards a vote begins, he said, adding he would work with the attorney general's office to work on regulations for the regents to follow.

"I do not want to have a continual war with the attorney general," Rogers said. "He (Sandoval) has made as much of a concession as he possibly can at this point."