So far, Kathleen Mitchell is hands down the most colorful potential candidate to turn up in the New London mayoral race.

I met with Mitchell, who has announced plans to form an exploratory committee for mayor, one morning this week at her apartment on Pequot Avenue.

I wouldn't say she was chain-smoking, because the cigarette constantly in her hand wasn't always lit, but she smoked a lot. She is also the first prospective candidate I've met with who routinely drops the F-bomb.

What does she think of one councilor's idea to spend city money to welcome Electric Boat to its new offices here?

"(Expletive) EB," she said. "EB got a good deal. They should be thanking us."

Mitchell also had a choice but unprintable expletive to describe city councilors' description of their vote to sell Riverside Park to the Coast Guard as a way to send the issue to voters. She says they could have approved a nonbinding referendum.

"The fix was in from the start," she said about the proposed sale.

Here's to welcoming a bomb thrower to the mayoral race.

Mitchell is the first potential candidate I've talked to who has no compunction about criticizing the others, who she says are not offering anything new to voters.

"What the hell, everyone else is (running,)" she said "Why not me?"

She admits she is not a traditional candidate.

"I'm not interested in hearing about hiring more police and fixing potholes," she said.

On other topics, Mitchell said she's against tax abatements for the developers proposing new apartments at Fort Trumbull.

"Feel free," she said about their threat to move on if they don't get tax cuts. "We'll muddle along. … Every abatement comes back to higher taxes for other property owners."

On hiring minorities to the fire department, she says the city needs to do what it takes to train and recruit qualified applicants.

"Ninety people and the best you can do is four minorities?" she remarked incredulously about the department's low number of minority firefighters.

Mitchell is a registered Democrat who once had a successful primary fight for a seat on the Democratic Town Committee. But she's never held any other elected office.

She said people urged her in the past to run for City Council, but she said she had no interest in that "rinky dink" job or in routinely missing Yankees games to attend council sessions.

She came up a little thin when I asked her about specific details on her campaign for mayor. She said she is prepared to primary for the Democratic nomination, but she didn't seem to know exactly what she would be required to do to get on the ballot.

On the other hand, Mitchell, the ultimate outsider and classic gadfly, seems to have a ready constituency.

The list of email addresses in the "to" box on her political emails seems endless, for instance. She routinely connects with many of her hundreds of friends on Facebook. In the time I met with her at home her cellphone rang constantly.

I hope she follows through and gets in the race, in part, because, well, the more the merrier. I also think she is uniquely qualified to put other candidates on the spot, to make the comfortable uncomfortable.

Mitchell came to public prominence with the fight over Fort Trumbull, and even now she is campaigning for the city to apologize for taking peoples' homes by eminent domain.

She is especially harsh in her criticism of Republican Councilor Rob Pero, consistently one of the highest vote-getters in City Council elections, for his role in voting for the use of eminent domain.

"Really, Rob, aren't you the ones who led the battle to take homes in Fort Trumbull?" she said.

Another target of her wrath is the New London Development Corp., which she calls "a group of mostly nonresidents known as the NLDC."

She says the city not the NLDC should hold title to the property at Fort Trumbull, a point with which I wholeheartedly agree. In fact, Sen. Richard Blumenthal agreed, too, when he was attorney general.

City councilors until now have been content to ignore state law on this point.

Mitchell, 67, said she has some health problems but is up to the rigors of a full-time job. She says it could even be less rigorous than her efforts at community activism.

She was a little reluctant when I asked her for biographical information, but she said she has four children, has been married and divorced more than once and her jobs have included stints with social service agencies and a paid position with the Neighborhood Alliance.

While she seems to feel free to criticize other Democrats, she has a lot of nice things to say about the current mayor, Republican Martin T. Olsen Jr.

"A lot of us like Marty Olsen. A lot of us see him as a uniter," she said, adding that she expects him to run.

I wonder if that means we might consider the bomb-throwing Mitchell as a placeholder for the amiable Mayor Olsen, should he eventually decide to get in the race and keep the title.

If he is interested, he should hurry up and get off the fence.

This is the opinion of David Collins