MAYOR GAVIN NEWSOM and the San Francisco City Planning Commission took a huge step forward last week by finally sending planning director Gerald Green packing. But the mayor's choice for an interim director, Dean Macris, sends exactly the wrong message about the future of the department – and makes it absolutely clear that the commission needs a community-based search, done openly, to chose a new permanent head for one of the city's most important, and troubled, agencies.

Green was former mayor Willie Brown's handpicked planner, and he presided over some of the worst destruction that's been done to San Francisco since the days of the Dianne Feinstein administration. The comparison to the Feinstein days is more than symbolic: Like Brown, Feinstein did just about anything the developers wanted, driving out small business, driving up rents, gentrifying neighborhoods, and walloping the city budget.

And like Brown, Feinstein had a planning director who did exactly what the mayor told him to, badly damaging the department's credibility and the city's landscape in the process. His name is Dean Macris.

Under Macris, more than 30 million square feet of new office space – more than was in all of downtown Boston – was crammed into the San Francisco skyline. The city planning department constantly violated the California Environmental Quality Act, downplaying the cumulative impact of all that development (until attorney Sue Hestor took the city to court and won a major appellate decision forcing the department to change its environmental-review policy). Macris's 1984 Downtown Plan shifted high-rise development South of Market, displacing manufacturing and killing blue-collar jobs and small businesses. He was always a top-down planner who was often at war with the neighborhoods and the community.

Macris probably can't do too much damage as an acting director, but the commission needs to watch him carefully. More important, it needs to make clear Macris isn't the type of director this city is looking for. The commissioners should begin working with environmentalists and neighborhood groups to develop a community-based recruitment and interviewing process – with none of the secrecy and backroom politics that have characterized so much of Newsom's hiring to date. San Francisco city planning needs to change, dramatically – and a new director who is part of the old school just won't fill the bill.