Sandy Collins, one day after officially having her name changed from Sandy Drabik, will launch a run for mayor of Toledo today to finish the two years remaining in the term of her late husband, Mayor D. Michael Collins.

Mrs. Collins, 68, said Tuesday she helped her husband develop his platform as a candidate in 2013, and thinks she is the best qualified of the expanding field of potential mayoral candidates to carry it through.

She said she will announce her candidacy at an event at 10:30 a.m. today in the campaign office Mr. Collins used at Foundation Park, at the corner of Byrne Road and Glendale Avenue.

“I am very excited about it. I have thought about it a lot. I didn’t take this step until I was sure.

“I wanted to see if I was electable and if I could put together an organization that can be successful, and I felt that both were happening to the best of my ability,” Mrs. Collins said.

So far, her opponents will be Mayor Paula Hicks-Hudson, the endorsed Democrat, and perennial mayoral candidate Opal Covey, a Republican.

Former Mayor Carty Finkbeiner, a Democrat, announced Monday that he is thinking of running for the two-year term.

There will be no primary for the special mayoral election Nov. 3, so everyone who qualifies will be on the ballot.

Mr. Collins was elected in 2013 and was 13 months into his term when he suffered cardiac arrest Feb. 1 while driving a city car during an intense snowstorm. He died five days later, and Ms. Hicks-Hudson was elevated from president of city council to mayor.

Mrs. Collins said she would outline her major issues today and would introduce her campaign team.

She said she would not run an expensive campaign, but declined to divulge her budget.

Mrs. Collins said she changed her name officially because she wanted to honor her husband.

She said she had retained the name Drabik because it was how she was known professionally, but that since retiring she had been increasingly known as Sandy Collins, until he died.

“I started getting called Drabik more. It felt like I was leaving Mike behind,” Mrs. Collins said in the house she and Mr. Collins moved into in early 2014 on Island Avenue in South Toledo.

The house has many Mike Collins mementos and photos.

Mrs. Collins on Tuesday received approval to change her name from Sandra Ann Drabik to Sandra Drabik Collins from Lucas County Probate Judge Jack Puffenberger after she did a mandatory 60-day public notice period. She said there were no objections that she knew of.

“It was totally emotional,” she said, adding that taking on her late husband’s name upset some of her female friends.

A longtime Republican who served in the cabinets of Republican governors George Voinovich and Bob Taft, she said she will run as an independent for mayor because that was how Mr. Collins ran.

As issues, she said she would push to make the temporary 0.75-percent income tax permanent because of the savings it will create by giving financial lenders more confidence in the city’s revenue source. She said she is committed to the incentive that Mr. Collins supported, which would tie to a public vote to end the quadrennial re-approval of the tax. If voters ever reject the tax renewal, the city’s income tax would drop from 2.25 percent to 2.2 percent.

Mrs. Collins said she would increase pressure on the state and federal governments to come through with the money needed to clean up the algae blooms in Lake Erie that threaten the water supplies of coastal communities every summer.

And she said she would focus on fixing streets.

Mrs. Collins said her career has been spent running the kinds of agencies that administer government, including public works, contracts, and public employment, and she would focus that expertise on Toledo government.

“It can probably be made more efficient and productive,” Mrs. Collins said.

Mrs. Collins said she would stick with her husband’s insistence that Lucas County pay for the cost of jailing inmates arrested under state law, which took away some $4 million a year in city jail fees, which Lucas County was counting on to help finance construction of a new jail.

“I’ve heard there’s discussion about the city paying for the jail again,” Mrs. Collins said.

Last fall, Mr. Collins announced the city police would begin charging all defendants under state law rather than city code, which meant that the county would have to pay the cost of their jailing.

“I want to hold that line. I don’t know how we would pay for that,” Mrs. Collins said. She said she was troubled by the amount of debt the city has taken on to pay for road work, and said the city can’t afford to take on more such debt for the jail.

Mrs. Collins also said she disagreed with the state House of Representatives’ backing of an amendment to the proposed next biennial budget that would deduct from the city’s local government fund an amount equal to how much it receives from red-light and speed-enforcement cameras.

“That is so over-reaching and heavy-handed by the state,” Mrs. Collins said. “I think it is onerous, maybe despicable.”

Asked whether she thought Mr. Finkbeiner would win by splitting the rest of the vote between her and Ms. Hicks-Hudson, she said, “I don’t think he’d get 40 percent. We know him too well. He was there 12 years. Mike was there one year. Look how much Mike got done.”

Mrs. Collins said she lived her first seven years on Foster Street in central Toledo until the family moved to Sylvania Township. She graduated from the former Sylvania High School and Ohio State University and then earned a law degree from the university.

She was director of administrative services, a cabinet position, under Mr. Voinovich, whom she has called her political hero, and was chief counsel and vice president for administrative services for the University of Toledo.

Mrs. Collins was married and divorced twice before her marriage to Mr. Collins in 2005.

The deadline for candidates to file at least 750 voter signatures to be in the mayoral election is Sept. 4.

Contact Tom Troy: tomtroy@theblade.com or 419-724-6058 or on Twitter @TomFTroy.

First Published May 20, 2015, 4:00 a.m.