Voters will select Toledo’s mayor for the next two years on Tuesday — an unexpected task mandated in the city charter after the death of Mayor D. Michael Collins in February.

And with seven candidates vying in the single election, with no primary, every vote is being fought for. On the ballot are:

● Former Mayor Mike Bell, 60, of 3010 Hopewell Place, a longtime Democrat running as an independent with the Lucas County Republican Party’s endorsement. He’s out to right his 2013 re-election defeat.

● Sandy Drabik Collins, 68, 3234 Island Ave., Mayor Collins’ widow, who vows to continue her husband’s platform, with a few ideas of her own.

● Opal Covey, 75, of 2236 Broadway St., South Toledo, running as an unendorsed Republican. She claims God has told her she will be mayor.

● Former Councilman Mike Ferner, 64, of 2975 113th St., a political independent who has mixed a national populist agenda into a plan to pave streets.

● Former three-term Mayor Carty Finkbeiner, 76, of 2260 Townley Rd., an unendorsed Democrat vowing to clean up a city that he said is looking bedraggled.

● Mayor Paula Hicks-Hudson, 64, of 2633 Robinwood Ave., who, as City Council president, became mayor automatically after Mayor Collins’ death and worked to be a steady hand in a crisis.

● Toledo Councilman Sandy Spang, 55, of 2055 Wildwood Blvd., a former Republican running as an independent and focusing on neighborhood business development.

Watch part 1 of Wednesday's debate

Watch part 2 of Wednesday's debate

Candidates may have planned to spend their time knocking on doors or meeting with voters in Block Watch gatherings.

Instead, they’ve been standing up in a series of debates and forums — at least 22 — in front of neighborbood groups, clubs, special-interest groups, and TV cameras. Street repairs and a creaky water system threatened by harmful Lake Erie algae were the nominal big issues of a campaign that rarely ventured much below the surface of campaign slogans.

The closest voters came to seeing political fights was between Mr. Bell and Mr. Finkbeiner over the extent of the deficit left by Mr. Finkbeiner at the end of 2009. Mr. Bell claimed it was a budget with a $48 million hole in it, while Mr. Finkbeiner points to the official audit that says the city ended the year just $8 million in the red.

Mr. Finkbeiner’s slogan shows up on hundreds of lawn signs — “Carty Gets the Job Done.” He reminds voters that he got Toledo a “most liveable city” award and was instrumental in the economic development Toledo saw in the last two decades.

His campaign is a living book about how to run for office, with a daily schedule of knocking on doors and shaking hands at workplaces, run from a West Laskey Road headquarters that is filled on Saturday mornings with volunteers arriving to get their instructions for the day.

“I would like to lead the city for the next two years so that we can once again be a safe city, a clean city, and go after good jobs for Toledoans,” Mr. Finkbeiner said.

Mrs. Collins started the election contest as Sandy Drabik, the name she’s used her professional life as a lawyer, cabinet director under former Ohio Gov. George Voinovich, and general counsel for the University of Toledo. After Mr. Collins’ death, she added his name to hers. Cynics saw it as politically motivated. She said it was to honor her late husband.

Struggling at times with laryngitis, she’s running a low-cost field campaign with homey, low-tech commercials, Facebook posts, and door-to-door outreach in Toledo’s homeowning neighborhoods.

“I am the candidate that will carry out the platform that was established by my husband," she said.

Mr. Bell is former longtime city fire chief whose rock-star level of popularity took a hit from his controversial single term as mayor.

“Maybe I didn’t show that but I really did care. Losing that election hurt. I’m back here because I truly care about the city of Toledo. I want to make it the greatest place in the world,” Mr. Bell said.

As mayor from 2010 through 2013, he balanced the deficit budget brought on by the Great Recession without laying off city workers or cutting services. To do so, he imposed unilateral cuts on the pay and benefits of unionized city employees and sold the Marina District.

His prescriptions are a quarter-percent increase in the income tax to make street repairs and install a second water intake in Lake Erie in cooperation with the city’s regional water consumers. Disdaining to wave signs on busy streets, he campaigned on social media and went to restaurants and charity walks to talk to people.

“What I want to do is be able to make sure we have an ability to fix the system. I’d like to be able to continue because I think we can fix this,” Mr. Bell said.

Ms. Hicks-Hudson tells voters she didn’t seek the mayor’s office. She said at a forum in Point Place that she was talked into running for council president by Councilman Lindsay Webb.

“You can blame her,” Ms. Hicks-Hudson said, flashing her trademark smile. A sole-practitioner lawyer, she also was director of the Lucas County Board of Elections and chief counsel of Gov. Ted Strickland’s budget office.

Taking over on Feb. 6 when Mr. Collins died, Ms. Hicks-Hudson retained most of his top administrators, wrapped up an agreement with ProMedica to repurpose the Toledo Edison Steam Plant as a corporate headquarters, and finished buying land for a Jeep Assembly Plant expansion that may not happen.

“Why I’m running is I realized after becoming mayor the need for continuity and the city not having to miss any steps by starting over again with a new mayor,” Ms. Hicks-Hudson said.

Ms. Spang was a last-minute entry, an instant wild card because of her relative youth and strong showing as a first-time at-large candidate for council in 2013.

Riding the success of her chic Plate 21 coffee shop on Rugby Drive in South Toledo, Ms. Spang wove a campaign that has attracted devoted admirers.

“I’m a job creator with 30 years experience in property management,” Ms. Spang cited. She has made the wonkish topic of budget reform her specialty and attended municipal governance conferences at her own expense to learn how to shake up Toledo’s “incomprehensible” budget.

Mr. Ferner’s run is a blast from the past with a whiff of populist progressivism. As an environmentally minded councilman from 1990 to 1993, Mr. Ferner pressed for energy efficiency and a crackdown on overly generous tax abatements.

After narrowly losing to Mr. Finkbeiner in the first strong-mayor election in 1993, Mr. Ferner worked as a union organizer and protested U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He returned to local politics with the unsuccessful effort to block the six-story garage ProMedica plans to build on Promenade Park.

“What we need is a mayor that’s not afraid to represent the public interest and working class families when corporations come to town and want to steal our tax base,” Mr. Ferner said.

Ms. Covey, a repeat candidate for mayor and the former owner of an East Toledo pet store and thrift shop that was shut down by the Toledo Humane Society, nurses a grudge and claims she’d have been mayor by now, except her votes were “stolen.”

Her idea of opening amusement parks on vacant city land to make Toledo a tourism magnet may appeal enough to some voters to propel her higher than the 1 percent of the vote she got when she ran in 2013.

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

First Published November 1, 2015, 4:00 a.m.