It was candidate Lori Hopkins-Cavanagh who turned out to be the bomb thrower at Tuesday's six-way debate in New London's historic race for a full-time mayor, causing the three incumbent city councilors in the race to run for cover.

"We are really good at giving away stuff in New London," said Hopkins-Cavanagh, in one of my favorite lines of the night, as she railed against the tax abatements approved recently by the City Council for new apartments on the prime waterside property of Fort Trumbull.

"We have become a city of apartment complexes," she said, asserting that it is absentee landlords who are undermining the city's school system and contributing to drug dealing and youth crime.

The city is now made up of more than 60 percent non-owner-occupied housing, she said.

The city is burning, she said, and something needs to be done, suggesting herself, of course, as the person best suited to put out the fires and set a new course.

Lacking any public polls, I don't know how voters will respond to Hopkins-Cavanagh as a candidate, but I do think the city's next mayor will not be any of the incumbent city councilors in the race.

City voters didn't overwhelmingly approve a charter change for a new form of government in order to give any of the same old folks who have been in charge more power.

There were a few exchanges in Tuesday's cleverly organized debate that revealed some of the same old behavior that voters are sure to try to sweep away Tuesday.

In one of these, candidate Martin Olsen engaged candidate Rob Pero in a long, tit-for-tat argument about whether anything was accomplished when the City Council held a joint meeting with the Board of Education.

Well, we all know it didn't stop the schools' further decline into failure.

Incumbents pointing fingers at each other over petty issues, when the city, well, is on fire, is not appealing to voters.

The wackier of these councilor-versus-councilor exchanges came when Olsen squared off with candidate Michael Buscetto III over the closing of the whale tale fountain on the Parade.

Buscetto recalled the "soiled" and dirty water coming out of the fountain last summer. Olsen said he ran through it.

Really, do they think this is what voters care about?

It would make anyone long for change.

Even candidate Andrew Lockwood, who stumbled through a shaky explanation of why he owes so much in back city taxes, managed to fire off some impressive attacks on the status quo.

Like the other political newcomers to the city, Hopkins-Cavanagh and Daryl Finizio, Lockwood took aim at the New London Development Corp. and said the city needs to assume responsibility for Fort Trumbull.

"There are smart people in New London, and we can take back our land and develop it properly," he smartly said.

One of the sharpest exchanges of the evening occurred between Pero and Finizio.

Pero started it, with a pop gun, complaining about sloppiness in Finizio's campaign finance reporting and concluding that he can't be trusted with city finances. Finizio fired back with an Uzi, saying that two of Pero's greatest achievements in office were taking homes in Fort Trumbull by eminent domain and arranging for the sale of Riverside Park.

Finizio also wielded a few other sharp elbows, saying he won't run a "pay to play" city. He took quite a few, too, being called by other candidates an "unknown" and a "young kid out of school."

Buscetto, in his closing remarks, blamed Finizio for "some of the nastiness" of the campaign.

It was interesting that, by luck of the draw, the candidates were seated on the high school auditorium stage Tuesday with all the incumbent councilors seated on one side and the newcomers on the other. Smart handicappers might give an edge to the newcomer side.

Voters will have the final say Tuesday on who will be the city's first powerful mayor in generations.

I don't know who it will be. But my guess is that it won't be anyone who had a hand in eminent domain, anyone who voted to give tax abatements to an out-of-town developer to build apartments at Fort Trumbull, anyone who supports the NLDC or anyone who advocates for selling Riverside Park.

But that's just a guess.

This is the opinion of David Collins.