The Queenstown-based councillor has spent six years on the regional council and the six years before that as a Queenstown Lakes district councillor.
She said yesterday she would not stand for local government in the October elections and would direct her energy elsewhere.
"It’s been full on, and I actually have thoroughly enjoyed most of the time," she said.
"It’s difficult, and local government’s really difficult.
"It’s incredibly difficult when you make plans locally and central government squashes them, as in the land and water plan.
"We’re really a centrally ruled country with very limited controls and powers given to local government."
When the government intervened and blocked a majority of seven councillors from voting to notify the council’s contentious land and water plan, Cr Bryan Scott resigned in protest.
Cr Forbes agreed yesterday she was now the second progressive councillor to have decided to step away from the council table this term.
Nevertheless, if she feared the council would become less progressive as a result of her departure, she would have decided to stand for re-election, she said.
Cr Forbes described herself yesterday as someone passionate about transport issues, the region’s deepwater lakes, long-term thinking and iwi relationships.
Despite appeals of the regional council’s representation review decision now under way, her departure would mean there would be two vacant seats for newcomers representing her corner of the region at the council table as the Dunstan ward continued its dramatic growth.
In her first term, at times she felt like "a lone voice" but after the 2022 elections, the council had added more progressive voices.
She now urged others to put their hands up.
Fights over the future of the Manuherikia River had become ugly during her tenure and could get ugly still.
And the decline in the water quality of lakes Wakatipu and Wanaka was the "worst news" councillors had received in her time, she said.
But the organisation, the regional council as a whole, was "in good heart".
