Salina ? Dennis Kissinger, whose 16 1/2-year tenure as city manager of Salina is the longest in the city’s history, will step down next year.

Kissinger, 54, said he would retire in December 2005.

“It’s an opportunity for me to maybe do something else in my life,” Kissinger said. “I’m young enough to maybe take a different path, to do some different things. My wife has assured me that I will not be able to be retiring to the house or the rocking chair.”

Kissinger said he made the final decision last week, but said he had known all along he wouldn’t be a graybeard in the city manager’s chair.

“I never planned on being an old city manager,” he said. “But the decision is not just based on the numbers, it’s based on your personal life and discussions with your spouse and family.”

Kissinger originally is from Kansas City, and his parents and his in-laws still live there, but he said there were no plans to move upon retirement.

“We have no plans to leave, but family is elsewhere, and that’s very important,” he said.

He has two children, a son living in Minneapolis, Minn., and a daughter who is a senior at Kansas University.

Mayor Monte Shadwick said he and the rest of the five-member City Commission soon would begin the process of finding Kissinger’s replacement.

“The next couple of weeks, we will get together and discuss how this will work,” Shadwick said. “Obviously, none of us on the commission have gone through this.”

Commissioner Paul Webb said he looked forward to the challenge of finding Salina’s next city manager, and he said some outside advice probably would be necessary.

“We haven’t done this for a number of years, and there really isn’t any expertise or history with the present City Commission,” Webb said.

Kissinger notified city commissioners of his decision Saturday. He called a staff meeting on Wednesday to give them the news. Before coming to Salina, Kissinger was city manager of Miamisburg, Ohio, a city of 18,000 at the time.

“They took a chance on a 30-something-year-old city manager to offer me the job,” Kissinger said of the Salina city commissioners in 1988.