Wanted: One visionary that has a solid planning background, the ability to lead community-wide conversation and a knack for distilling conflicting public input.

The goal: Use all of those talents to determine the plan that will define how Ann Arbor looks in the future.

All of those traits fit the job description for Ann Arbor’s next Planning & Development Services manager, which is posted nationally until Nov. 13.

The position - left vacant when former director Mark Lloyd resigned in June - has been filled by interim director Wendy Rampson.

But Jayne Miller, Community Services Area administrator, says that Rampson won’t apply for the job - leaving the likelihood that the next planning director will come from outside of the city, and possibly outside of Michigan.

“We’re doing a national search for the position,” Miller said. It pays $72,469 - $119,573 per year, according to the posting.

The role directs both the planning and building departments, which were unified under Lloyd.

“When we hired Mark, his focus was on the restructuring and consolidating the two departments,” Miller said. “This time around, (there’s a focus) on leadership both externally and internally… to take the service level to the next level.”

The new hire’s role in the community will be emphasized, as the new hire drives some key planning initiatives.

Among them: Supervising new downtown zoning and the A2D2 design guidelines, rewriting and consolidating elements of the city’s master plan and directing the historic district study commissioned for the South Fourth and South Fifth avenues.

The new hire, Miller said, will be asked to help facilitate finding answers to “Where do we want to be as a city? And what does the city want to look like over the long term?”

Answers to those questions play out episodically as developments are proposed and make their way through planning.

Developers have been critical over the years about the city’s responses to their projects, including inconsistencies between zoning regulations and how a project is received by city officials.

The public also has been critical of development processes, particularly over height and density issues downtown as critics of developments find that their views collide with what is allowed by city ordinance.

The new hire will help set direction for the city on all of those issues, and bring consistency across the processes that affect development.

“It’s a significant hire,” Miller said.

The city - under the direction of council to encourage development - now needs the planning director to drive bigger-picture planning issues, Miller said.

“As the community is wrestling with all of this potential development, what do we want our roadmap to be from the planning and zoning perspective?” she said.

Some developers stretch what the community is comfortable with, Miller said. At the same time, the zoning regulations were done in the 1960s, "and as a society, our goals are very different than they were in the '60s," she said, citing examples like regulations that encourage urban sprawl.

"Our zoning code is one way to … encourage more sustainable development," she said.

Steps already have begun toward making changes, even without the hire, Miller said. 

"We just contracted with (a firm) to clean up the zoning code and clean up the inconsistencies," she said. "A year from now we'll start to rewrite city’s zoning code - which is almost 50 years old."