A lot of questions are being asked around town today about how Fernando Ferrer is raising his campaign cash — and where it’s coming from. That’s because the latest Campaign Finance Summary for the 2005 Citywide Elections, contain some startling numbers for Mr. Ferrer. They show that he lists net contributions of $751,976 from 637 contributors while listing net expenditures of only $18,248.

These kinds of numbers are raising eyebrows because they are way out of line from normal financing patterns. This can be seen in the adjacent chart, which shows that, for example, outlays of $492,094 by the City Council speaker, Gifford Miller, plus $310 in liabilities, ran to about 19% of the $2,552,604 in net contributions. Outlays of $387,075 by the New York City comptroller, William Thompson, ran to 25% of the $1,537,691 in his contributions.

Experts we talked to say that for a normal campaign in this phase, expenditures run between 10% and 30% of funds raised. It doesn’t automatically follow that a campaign that is running off that normal line is corrupt. But someone running way off that average bears closer inspection. How is Mr. Ferrer’s campaign bringing in so much cash for so little cost?

It turns out that even the $18,248 that Mr. Ferrer lists as “expenditures” significantly overstates the amount he has spent on fundraising. That figure includes $880 in fundraising costs for the Global Strategy Group, LLC — the $800 that the group says is the fair market cost for renting the group’s offices in Manhattan for a fundraiser earlier this month, along with $80 for the elevator operator who worked the fundraiser. But Global Strategy Group never actually charged the Ferrer campaign for the space, or for the elevator operator.

Of the $18,248 in the Ferrer filings, $4,000 of it is campaign consulting expenses for Mirram Global LLC, a joint venture between Global Strategy Group and the Mirram Group. That bill, too, was written off by Mirram Global as an in-kind contribution. And the Mirram Group itself made a $2,000 in-kind contribution of its campaign consulting services. So $6,880 of the $18,248 didn’t even get charged to the campaign in real cash.

The president of Mirram Group, Luis A. Miranda, who helped Mr. Ferrer raise the money, first said that $4,000 “was the market rate for what we do.” Pressed, he acknowledged, “We have other candidates that we charge a little more.” But he said that Mr. Ferrer’s initial burst of fundraising had been less onerous than work for some other candidates. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm,” he told us, saying the effort was “basically dealing with a group of friends.”

Asked why Mirram Global LLC and the Mirram Group didn’t charge the Ferrer campaign for their work, Mr. Miranda told us, “At this stage of the game, we are consultants, but at the same time Freddy Ferrer supporters. We were nice guys.”

The Global Strategy guys seem to have a penchant for giving things away for free — last year they were fined $150,000 by the state lobbying commission for giving politicians free Yankees tickets and not disclosing it. And speaking of the Yankees, that’s the point — the Global Strategy Group and the Mirram Group aren’t just campaign fundraising and strategy consultants, they are lobbyists. The Mirram Group has been registered with the state to lobby for the Coalition for the Homeless, the Empire State Beer Distributors Association, and the Yes Network, which broadcasts the Yankees. Mirram Global has been registered with the state to lobby for Center Care and Brooklyn Psychiatric Centers on health issues, and New Visions on education issues.

For sure it’s nice of these lobbyists to help raise all these hundreds of thousands of dollars for Mr. Ferrer without charging him any money for it. But when and if Mr. Ferrer becomes Mayor Ferrer and he has to make decisions on things like whether the Yankees get a new city-subsidized stadium, or whether the city can kick unruly homeless people out of shelters, the taxpayers may suspect that those nice guy lobbyists won’t be in such a generous mood if Mr. Ferrer decides not to cooperate.

“I’m pretty sure that $6,000 won’t buy him,” Mr. Miranda said of Mr. Ferrer, pledging to us that “moving forward,” his firm’s fundraising and campaign consulting services “will not be in-kind” and “will be market rate.”

As a matter of principle, we’ve got little patience for the lobbying and campaign finance rules that regulate these sorts of relationships, regarding them as infringements on freedom of speech. We’ve got no reason to doubt Mr. Ferrer’s integrity, and no one is suggesting any of the rules have been broken here. In fact, in contrast to an earlier case involving Alan Hevesi and his consultant Hank Morris, here the free services provided by the consultant seem to have been carefully itemized and disclosed as in-kind contributions.

Yet as a practical political matter, if Mr. Ferrer intends to defeat a billionaire mayor who can claim he owes nothing to any special interests, starting his campaign by accepting free or discounted campaign help from lobbyists isn’t probably the smartest way to make a good first impression on the voters.