When she peeks out her door in Upper Fells Point and sees her neighbors' recycling bins lined up and overflowing with cans and cardboard, the executive director of the Herring Run Watershed Association knows that the system is working.

Mary Sloan Roby hopes the incoming mayor will keep the city's new recycling campaign rolling - along with the rest of Sheila Dixon's Cleaner Greener Baltimore initiative.

"Baltimore is considered a 'green' city, which 20 years ago would have seemed impossible," Roby says.

Roby would ask Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake to make the city greener still, and to understand why Baltimore must embrace the color and the concept.

The new mayor, Roby says, must make sure the city's tree canopy continues to spread, must create more green jobs, must repair city pipes that wastefully leak water, must require LEED standards for all city buildings, must pay attention to neglected city parks and must figure out how to pay for an improved storm water system.

HER RECORD

In the past, Rawlings-Blake has introduced environmentally minded bills to improve enforcement in cases of illegal dumping and to create "green collar" jobs in the city.