It seems to me that New London Mayor Daryl Finizio, in his latest iteration as a candidate for re-election - after he stopped being the selfless, I'll-step-aside-for-the-good-of-the-city mayor - has to count on a short voter memory.

After the mayor made his revived candidacy official Saturday, with a rousing prediction for the great places he is personally taking the city, I couldn't help but remember some of the bigger embarrassments of the Finizio years, and there have been a lot of them.

Will voters be able to forget, for instance, when the mayor, not very long ago, speaking before local college students, complained about defense pork and said we have enough submarines?

Wow. What an insult to the city's largest employer and major taxpayer, which designs and builds submarines. If the city were dominated by a clock factory, would the mayor suggest the world has too many clocks?

As for scaring college students, remember when he went up to Connecticut College and asked students on the tax-free campus to come down the hill and vote for his budget, with its whopping 7.5 percent tax increase.

He warned, according to the college paper, that the city teetered on bankruptcy, when, really, everyone else in the city knew the most dire budget consequences in play were things like closing the senior center. Bankruptcy?

He told the students to vote for the tax increase to prevent a state takeover.

"This could crush the city of New London; most small businesses would fail and the downtown that I'm sure many of you enjoy going to would be sacrificed to correct this budget gap."

Yikes.

Who will be able to forget all the mayor's doomsday news conferences and scares, fiscal calamity, the water system drying up, mass layoffs of firefighters and other falling skies that, in the end, never budged.

And what of the actual calamities that he ignored?

Who can forget that a city resident lost his life in an accident at the transfer station that a state investigation later revealed was the result of "willful" and "serious" safety violations, which the city ignored even after being warned and fined?

The Finizio administration never conducted its own investigation into what went wrong at the transfer station, beyond a police review, and no one was ever held accountable for the unnecessary death. That is shocking.

The transfer station death has become the substance of one of the many lawsuits against the city from the Finizio years, citing incompetence. There have been so many liability lawsuits that they made the city's insurance deductible soar.

The failure to correct fatal safety violations at the transfer station is just one example of what has often appeared to be gross mismanagement of the city, from trash-strewn streets to leaving the city's own downtown sidewalks unplowed during a long, snowy winter.

Who can forget the heating system failure that filled the City Hall lobby with steam almost all last winter? How can you run a city if you can't stop a simple steam leak?

It kind of makes you nostalgic for the "old guard," as Finizio ridicules them - city officials who used to hire experienced professional managers to make sure the streets were plowed, the heat worked in City Hall and that residents didn't risk their lives on routine trips to the transfer station.

As for the improvement in the city schools and plans for the new all-magnet system, it is painful to watch the mayor's ego gobble up so much of the credit for what others have achieved.

The mayor can rightly claim credit for helping lay the groundwork to bring the National Coast Guard Museum downtown. There is no question that could be a transformative development for New London, if it happens.

And yet it seems to me that the administration otherwise gets a big F on luring new development to the city.

You don't have to look much farther than the abandoned Lighthouse Inn to see the city's failure to have any kind of proactive marketing and development plan. At least list the abandoned city-owned building for sale and try to entice someone other than vandals to check it out.

Even the mayor hasn't tried to argue the downtown is more vital since he took office. I can guarantee he won't carry the downtown merchants' vote. I count as many empty storefronts as when he took office, if not more.

The mayor ran against the evils of eminent domain at Fort Trumbull but then made the first major appointment of his administration a woman who was a champion of eminent domain when she was mayor. He has also kept on the law firm that defended the city's use of eminent domain.

He maneuvered into place a new president of the redevelopment agency that he had promised on the campaign trail to abolish, and then he went to war with her.

Meanwhile, no new ideas for developing Fort Trumbull have been suggested.

Really, the list of things the mayor needs voters to forget is almost endless. How about his firing of the first black firefighter hired by the city in more than 30 years? Or having the city charge a fee for the annual Martin Luther King walk through downtown?

Or what about his offering some $90,000 in settlement money to the police chief who helped him get elected, the same chief he later put on what now looks like a never-ending paid administrative leave. Nice work if you can get it.

Remember the staged news conference in which he descended from the woods of Riverside Park to announce he would legally void the outcome of a vote to sell Riverside Park to the Coast Guard, the voters' will be damned?

Maybe the mayor's gamble on short voter memory will pay off. He has proven himself to be a skillful campaigner and deft at tapping into new voter enthusiasm.

The election season is young, and I am not sure I've seen any sign of a candidate who can beat him.

This is the opinion of David Collins

d.collins@theday.com

Twitter: @DavidCollinsct