Courtney Padgett: Burbank's Assistant City Manager

Courtney Padgett has a simple rule for hard decisions: take the harder path.

It sounds straightforward. But for Burbank’s Assistant City Manager, it’s a philosophy she traces back to early in her career, when a manager handed her that piece of advice during a rough stretch in a new role. Two paths, the manager told her. An easy one and a hard one. The hard one is almost always right.

“Over the years I have applied that advice frequently, and I’ve found it to be overwhelmingly accurate,” Padgett said. “Taking the harder path has consistently helped me grow, both professionally and personally, and make better decisions for the community, organization, and staff.”

Padgett joined the city of Burbank in 2017, building her career here before making it official last year by becoming a resident. Before Burbank, she worked in correctional administration, a background that might seem like a sharp left turn from municipal government but one she credits with shaping how she operates. Her most influential mentor from that period was a female Captain who supervised her during her first time working in what Padgett describes as a sworn, paramilitary environment: highly structured, highly regulated, and unlike anything in traditional public administration.

Those lessons travel. The discipline, the clear hierarchy, the expectation that decisions carry weight because they directly affect people’s lives, all of it informed the administrator she became.

At City Hall, Padgett now oversees operations for a city that punches above its weight when it comes to civic engagement. She’s noticed something about Burbank that she didn’t always find in larger organizations: people actually show up.

“Burbank has maintained a sense of community that has been lost in many other places,” she said. “People show up at Council meetings, call City Hall, and engage with us regularly, not always because they agree with every decision, but because they genuinely care about making Burbank the best it can be.”

That kind of engagement can be demanding. It means city staff face a more vocal, more informed, and sometimes more critical public than in places where residents have checked out of local government entirely. Padgett sees that as an asset, not a burden.

Before her time in Burbank, she worked for large organizations where, as she put it, connecting with the community in meaningful ways was sometimes a challenge. The scale swallowed the relationship. Here, she said, the connection between City Hall and the people it serves is direct and visible. She sees it in council chambers, hears it in the calls that come into the city, and notices it walking Burbank’s streets, something she considers as valuable a source of information as any meeting or memo.

That on-the-ground perspective matters to her. It’s one thing to read planning documents or review budget line items. It’s another to walk Magnolia Park or cut through a neighborhood near McCambridge Recreation Center and understand what the city actually looks and feels like to the people who live there.

She’s one of those people now. Becoming a Burbank resident after years working here gave her a different kind of stake in the decisions her office handles. The city’s infrastructure, its parks, its traffic patterns and sidewalks, all of it became personal in a new way.

Padgett speaks about her colleagues with the same directness she applies to her own work. She calls Burbank’s staff “the best team in any city,” and frames her ability to watch that team make a difference in residents’ daily lives as a privilege rather than a given.

The profile she presents is not that of a polished administrator reciting talking points. It’s someone who has spent years in demanding environments, absorbed hard lessons, and carried them into a city that demands a lot from its government because it cares about what that government does.

Choose the harder path. It’s simple advice. In a city where residents show up and pay attention, it turns out to be useful.