Calabasas' First City Planner Retires

Tom Bartlett served for two decades.

July 27, 2026 · Calabasas

Tom Bartlett, the planner hired in 2004 to build Calabasas' planning division essentially from scratch, is retiring in early August after more than 20 years with the city and nearly 40 in the profession.

Bartlett missed what would have been his final Planning Commission meeting Thursday for a family matter, so Michael Klein, the community development director read a prepared tribute into the record in his absence. He credited Bartlett with taking "a planning division that was cobbled together out of necessity from the early days of city incorporation" and turning it into a professional operation.

The tribute tracked the history of modern Calabasas: adoption of the 2030 General Plan, four regional housing cycles, the comprehensive development code update, the Mont Calabasas annexation, and a project list that includes the Canyon Creek and Horizons senior housing, the Viewpoint School campus master plan, The Oaks subdivision, the Summit at Calabasas, and the auto dealerships along Calabasas Road. Bartlett also served throughout as the city's historic preservation officer.

Before Calabasas, he was planning director in Santa Paula and a planning administrator in Indianapolis, and along the way mentored more than 30 planners, many of whom went on to run planning departments of their own. "His greatest legacy may not be the projects he completed," the director said, "but the people he inspired."

The commission isn't quite letting him go: Bartlett is expected back for a joint Old Town meeting he helped prepare, and commissioners voted, informally and enthusiastically, to hold his send-off at the Sagebrush Cantina on Aug. 6,  "where there are margaritas," Klein said.