Forbes leaves Media City

A model of the sprawling 391-acre Universal Studios site in Universal City fills roughly half of the eight-floor conference room in the Lew R. Wasserman building, which overlooks Lankershim Boulevard from just inside the site’s gate. Last Friday, Joy Forbes, former Community Development Director for the city of Burbank, waved her arm over it.

“This is me,” she said, referring to her new area of responsibility on the model. She’ll be helping to build out the master plan and implement mitigations called for in the site’s environmental report.

Last week was Forbes’ first week as NBC Universal’s vice president for global real estate planning and development. When she left her job with the city earlier this month, she became the seventh person to depart from Burbank’s Community Development staff in the past year, most within the past six months, said City Manager Mark Scott.

Other cities — Pasadena alone has hired up three planners — and now a major corporation, have wooed them with what Scott called “career enhancements.” Forbes said the studio made her a “generous offer.” Is it a brain drain? “Absolutely,” Scott said in an interview last week.

“I’m happy for them, but not happy for us,” Scott said.

The “front-line experience” Burbank’s staff members get on the job has made them attractive to other organizations, including the cities of Irvine and South Pasadena, which “have recognized the talent in my team,” Scott said. The silver lining in all of the turnover — and that’s what he said he has to look for — is the opportunity to build a fresh team.

Four replacements have already been hired and three more are being recruited. An executive recruiting firm has started the search for Forbes’ successor. In the interim, Deputy City Manager Justin Hess has taken the reins of the department.

Scott said he plans to make changes that will give city employees the chance to advance their careers while staying in Burbank. Forbes spent 20 years with the city, starting while in graduate school at Cal Poly Pomona, first as an intern in the Redevelopment Agency before she “worked my way up to an intern in planning.”

She said she just kept advancing, eventually serving four years as deputy city manager beginning in 2009 and becoming director of the Community Development Department in 2013. Forbes said she was happy as a city employee and wasn’t looking to leave, but the studio approached her with the “opportunity of a lifetime.”

“The city was so good to me,” Forbes said, adding that she met many close friends there, including her husband.

Marrying into the family made her one of a long line of Forbes who have worked for the city. Her departure brought an end to that nearly 50-year streak, noted Councilman Jess Talamantes earlier this month when the City Council said their farewells to her.

Leaving wasn’t a choice that she made easily, she said, but only after deciding she could continue “doing good” and as an employee of a corporation rather than the government. Part of what swayed her was the fact that she will be doing much of the same type of work, but from the perspective of someone involved in “actual development.”

One aspect in particular that she said she looks forward to is community engagement.

“You really are doing that here, too,” she said. “It is like a mini city — an almost 400-acre [one].”

Plus, she said she knows from experience that she’ll maintain the relationships she developed at the city. And she can still keep an eye on it from her new office.

“I can see Burbank from my window,” Forbes said.

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Chad Garland, chad.garland@latimes.com

Twitter: @chadgarland