Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council are both trying to tilt the city’s campaign finance system in their favor. The mayor is urging the city’s Campaign Finance Board to track campaign contributions from city contractors and vendors. That would make it easier to track the actions of City Council members who have received money from those with business before the city. It could lead to an attempt to ban such contributions. The council, meanwhile, voted its members for their campaign war-chests an increased “match” of up to $6 in city funds for every $1 they raise in private donations.

The chairman of the finance board, Frederick Schwarz Jr., wrote in a letter to the City Council’s Governmental Operations Committee that, “The issue of potential influence peddling when candidates accept contributions from those doing business with the city is one that requires serious attention.” Mr. Bloomberg seems to agree; he referred this week to “people who like the corruption that they have been able to engage in and want to continue to do that.”

If Mr. Bloomberg has evidence of corruption on the City Council involving city expenditures, the responsible move would be to make specific charges known to the public, to the Department of Investigation, and to the relevant local or federal prosecutors. Otherwise, the mayor’s loose accusations will do little more than further undermine public confidence in the integrity of the city government as a whole.

The City Council, meanwhile, is making its own accusations against Mr. Bloomberg. “Mike Bloomberg is single-handedly working to destroy the CFB’s model campaign finance system,” the City Council speaker, Gifford Miller, said in a statement on Monday. Mr. Miller, who plans on running for mayor himself, accuses wealthy candidates who finance their own campaigns of perverting the city’s election process. But Mr. Bloomberg’s wealth doesn’t make him deserving of such demonization. It’s far less objectionable for the mayor to finance his own campaign than for the council to raid the public treasury – by raising the cap on matching funds, as it did last week – to finance his opponents.

Our own sense is that a vigorous press and campaign opposition researchers are able to sniff out the ties between campaign contributions and government actions without requiring additional help from a new layer of city campaign finance bureaucracy. And the regular politicians running against wealthy, self-financed opponents have been able to hold their own politically by caricaturing their opponents as rich and out of touch. It’s yet another situation where campaign finance “reforms” are a distraction from the genuine issues.