If there is a parade in Annapolis, Mayor Gavin Buckley is out front. There he was Sunday, one of the first marching down West Street for St. Patrick’s Day.

It’s what he’s done for eight years, leading the 380-year-old capital of Maryland with political showmanship that somehow manages to divide and unite.

Now, the end of that parade is in sight. Term-limited, Buckley leaves office in December.

I sat down recently with the mayor at Market House, the city-owned waterfront food hall. It was the day after a commission that protects the Historic District approved a 4,500-square-foot, glass-and-wood maritime welcome center at City Dock.

It would be a modern addition to an ancient place, capping a planned $100 million transformation of a waterfront parking lot into a green space facing the Chesapeake Bay, dotted with fountains, stages and pergolas — all of it raised 8 feet above the water as a barrier to climate-driven flooding.

Buckley believes the project, developed over six years, will start construction this summer, despite uncertain federal money and a challenge in court Monday.

He has made friends. A former undocumented immigrant from Australia, he talks about connecting with the third of Annapolis that is Black or Hispanic.

And enemies. He makes no secret of dismissing critics and preservationists as people who didn’t vote for him anyway.

If this project gets built, Roscoe Rowe might be the only mayor who comes close in redefining Annapolis. Seventy-five years ago, the Republican doubled the size of the city, linking it to a new highway and an unfinished Bay Bridge.

Buckley, not surprisingly, has an opinion on how his city compares to Rowe’s.

“We’re not perfect, but we have a great-quality life,” he said. “The reason things are expensive is because everybody wants to move here.”

Buckley toyed with joining the Democratic field seeking to replace Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman next year. Instead, he will return to his businesses, restaurants.

“It’s a family decision,” he said.

He and a handful of partners began changing Annapolis in 1999. They opened a sushi house, Tsunami, on West Street. With a minimalist interior, dancing and a gay night, it was a hip flag planted in a sometimes stuffy town.

Next, they converted 19th-century buildings down the street into more vibey businesses. It helped kick off the reinvigoration of West Street as a corridor of cool.

Poking at preservation powers got political in 2015. Buckley hired muralist Jeff Huntington to paint “Agony and Ecstasy Live Together in Perfect Harmony” on the facade of Tsunami, a building where Thomas Jefferson slept. They didn’t get a permit, arguing they didn’t need one, and ended up in court.

The fight helped elect him two years later and cemented past-vs.-future thinking as a perpetual foil. It’s been an asymmetric fight.

Historic Annapolis’ leaders support the resilience plan, just not all the park elements. A recent survey of downtown residents found most feel the same way.

In January, CEO Karen Theimer Brown wrote in an “advocacy alert” that the whole thing should be halted until a judge rules on attorney C. Edward Hartman III’s challenge to the approval process.

“They lie,” Buckley said. “How can you say that you support the park and then you support Ed Hartman?”

Brown and others return the rancor, accusing the mayor of vilifying Historic Annapolis for political advantage. She reminded her supporters that, long before Buckley, her group was changing Annapolis by saving its past.

“The public needs to be reminded that we DO say yes to progress and that we have influenced change for the better of our community for close to 75 years,” she wrote Tuesday.

Eight years. It’s been more than just City Dock for Buckley.

Now 63, he was mayor during the COVID-19 pandemic, two mass shootings and dozens of homicides.

You can’t, he said, prevent everything bad from happening.

“Who would have a police officer at a pickup soccer game? Who would put a police officer at the front of our house when a parent lets a shooter in the basement to execute someone?” Buckley said.

Historic flooding swamped the waterfront 120 times last year. There were fights over a Main Street bike lane and outdoor dining. There’s a plan for an electric ferry.

Buckley settled a lawsuit over the city’s failure to spot unsafe public housing with inspections, only to get mired in three others.

Now he regrets settling the first and opposes doing it again.

“We maintain that we don’t inspect federal, state and county buildings, right? We never have,” he said.

Yet the city is working with its opponent in two of those lawsuits, the Annapolis housing authority.

It joined a $3 million bailout of the federally chartered agency and teamed up in a bid for federal redevelopment of the city’s worst homes, Eastport Terrace and Harbor House. The application won’t win, Buckley said, but the pitch caught the attention of money.

“The developers that have come forward have another way to finance it,” he said.

With Buckley’s era ending, you can hear Annapolis yearning for old habits.

Every election cycle, some well-heeled homeowner calls for merging city services with the county to help cut property taxes. Efficient government is a theme of fall elections.

Maybe it’s different this time.

Taxes went up in the mayor’s first budget but then stayed stable. Republicans lost their lone seat on the council, and its longest-serving member is leaving.

The city has its highest credit rating ever, a new public works center, waterfront parks and bike trails in development.

Most mayors nibble around the edges of relevance, soon forgotten. It’s a job of details, work that makes it hard to see the horizon.

If Buckley is better remembered, it might be for having vision in an old town that changes slowly.

“While we do great, big, crazy things and get in all sorts of conflicts with different people,” Buckley said, “I think we’ve been governing well.”