After lockheed and the rest of the aerospace industry left town, robert tague led the city’s efforts to rebuild its economic base with entertainment and media companies When Robert M. Tague joined the redevelopment team in Burbank nine years ago, the city was a shadow of its former self. Abandoned by the aerospace industry, Burbank had lost thousands of jobs. Warehouses, factories and office buildings stood vacant. Shopkeepers had fled and the phrase, “beautiful downtown Burbank,” had become a joke heard nightly by millions from Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. Today, Burbank is a thriving mid-sized city with some 130,000 jobs, mostly in the entertainment and high-tech industries paying an average annual salary of $73,000 and generating gross sales tax receipts of more than $16.9 million. And, with another 3 million square feet of office space currently in the pipeline for development, Burbank continues to attract the attention of real estate developers and corporations. Tague, Burbank’s community development director, has been in the field since graduating from college, ever since he became one of the first participants in an urban renewal fellowship program initiated by the late President John F. Kennedy and went to work in his hometown of Kansas City. He was asked to leave his first senior post as redevelopment director for East Orange, N.J., after turning in the agency’s attorney for buying property in the redevelopment zone he represented. And the labyrinth of bureaucracy he found in his next post as head of redevelopment for Dade County, Florida forced him to leave the industry altogether while he re-evaluated his professional career. But now, as he prepares to retire from his post in Burbank, he can look back on a different experience. From his front-row seat, Tague helped transform the city from being the butt of late-night jokes to being a premier address for Southern California’s media industry. He devised programs offering financial incentives to business, cut red tape for developers and eased restrictions that continue to hamper growth in most other cities, including Los Angeles, where he also has worked. Question: What were your impressions when you first got to Burbank? Answer: I remember my first visit downtown. The mall had just been completed, so that was a big break for us, and the 14-plex (movie theater) had just opened. So there were two main pieces there, but they had not done anything downtown, and I swear, you could have shot a cannon off and not hit anything. There was not a restaurant. You couldn’t find a place to eat, the streets were vacant at night. It just closed up tight as a drum. Q: Was there one event that signaled the turning point for Burbank’s resurgence? A: We came in and did a five-point economic development plan in my first two months. Businesses wanted to move to a city where it was easy to get through the entitlement process, so we set in motion a streamlining. If there is any one major event that occurred, that had to be it. We adopted an ordinance that allowed anything below what we call regionally significant development (state-defined size requirements) to occur. If (building plans) didn’t exceed that, (developers) came directly through here, and we guaranteed them that they could get through their process in four weeks. No city had ever done that before. Q: Why do you think it hadn’t been done before? A: There were a couple of holdups that a lot of cities wouldn’t take on. One of those was environmental review. In order to get past that hurdle, we set up a group of business people in town and talked about the one issue that always holds that up, the impact of traffic. We laid out a traffic mitigation plan which would allow a million square feet of growth a year and put a fee against all development, a traffic mitigation fee, which paid for fire, police, recreation and everything else, so there was one fee they paid when they came through the door. Our argument was, you know for certain what your fee is going to be, and you get through the process quickly. And that’s what they wanted, certainty on price and expedited review. Q: Didn’t that mean that the fees didn’t always cover the mitigation required in some areas? A: We then turned around and set up a fund through the redevelopment agency and the city’s general fund and contributed money in which we then put in specific target areas of the city, like downtown and Golden Gate, where we wanted to encourage development. We paid the fee for them, so they got the expedited review, they got their certainty in cost and we paid for any additional impact. That process was probably our claim to fame. That’s really what got the community and everyone else (behind us). Q: What other strategies did you use? A: There were a couple of pieces that were subtle, and probably people didn’t know were happening, that I think were probably major events. One, we poured a lot of money, $350,000 a year, into an ad campaign to sell Burbank and to bring the high-tech, cleaner industries into the community. We advertised in technical journals, in the Hollywood Reporter and entertainment magazines and really worked hard in creating the image that this is the media capital of the world. And then I think the other pieces were some of the rezoning issues downtown. Q: So there wasn’t one tenant that made the difference? A: We did a series of economic development loans. There were about a dozen of those. Prior to the last six, seven, eight years, none of the (entertainment industry tenants) moved to downtown Burbank. You didn’t move into this side of the freeway, so we purposely gave a financial assistance package to businesses that went in there. Q: You came from the L.A. Community Redevelopment Agency, which has had mixed results. Why do you think its track record has been so different? A: Extremely different. Size. Burbank is a smaller community with direct access to the political process, where the community is a lot more involved. L.A. is run by council people who have way too much power and it’s just real difficult to gather public support in one direction or another. Each council district has a quarter of a million people. Burbank has five city council people with 100,000 people. It’s just easier. Q: Isn’t there also less bureaucracy because of the smaller size of Burbank? A: In most cities there’s a department of planning, a department of building and safety, a redevelopment agency, a separate housing authority, separate environmental sections, transportation department. In this city they’re all under one department. The first thing I did when I got here, I took a redevelopment project manager and put him in charge of a planning project. I wanted the redevelopment people and the planning people and the building people to all be thinking of the project. We didn’t have our own little turfs to build. And because they all reported to me, we were able to bring about a level of cooperation and teamwork among the staff. It wasn’t the redevelopment people being business-friendly and the planning people not being business-friendly. We were all pulling on that same rope together. And that has been one of the real blessings. In L.A., you don’t have that. You have everybody running in separate directions. Q: Why did you leave the industry after working in Dade County? A: That was my first big job, and the challenges were horrendous. It was so big they were almost insurmountable. I decided to leave and re-look at my life and decide if what I wanted to do is try to solve what seemed to be unbelievable problems that couldn’t be solved. I took a couple years sabbatical and traveled around the country. If you work in this business long enough, and especially in communities like L.A. and Miami, the level of poverty, the level of human suffering and indignity is so great. You see so much that sometimes it’s time to walk away from it. Q: What are your plans now? A: I’ve been in this business for 38 years. I’m turning 60 this year. If I want to step out and do something else with my life, it needs to be done now. To set new goals and accomplish them over the next 20 years is what I want to do. (My plans) range from working on the private-sector side in building some buildings and retrofitting. I’m looking at spending more time on personal issues like human rights that, as a government worker, I couldn’t become involved in. I can speak out more on those issues now, I’d like to do that. And I love to restore old homes. I restored an 1890 home in Santa Barbara and I restored a 1920 home in the Silver Lake area in L.A., and I plan on doing some more historical restoration. That is probably as far from what people could ever imagine a guy who’s torn down half the city would do. And I’ll spend a lot of time traveling the world. Q: What’s the first thing you’ll do when you retire? A: I’m going to go to Santa Barbara and sit on the beach and read a good book and probably have a margarita in the afternoon.