The New York State Assembly will not consider the expansion plans of the United Nations as long as the Senate won’t, leaving the fate of the proposal in the hands of New York City’s Republican senators.

“I’m not going to move forward with this bill at this point unless it is clear to me there is support in both the Senate and the Assembly,” Assemblyman Steven Sanders, a Democrat of Manhattan, told The New York Sun yesterday. Mr. Sanders, whose district includes the area around the Secretariat, introduced the U.N.-expansion legislation in the Assembly at the request of city officials, he said.

The assemblyman added, “At this point I don’t perceive there is the necessary support in the Legislature to pass this bill. Whether that is on the merits or not, that is the reality.”

This puts New York City’s four Republican state senators – Martin Golden of Brooklyn, John Marchi of Staten Island, Frank Padavan of Bellerose, and Serphin Maltese of Queens – on the front lines of the U.N.-expansion fight, according to a source close to the senators.

“The upstate Republicans will listen to the city Republicans, because it’s their turf,” he said. “And they’re pretty dug in, and so are their constituents [on blocking the U.N. expansion]. So it doesn’t hurt them at all, and so it’s really the governor and Bloomberg that have to make it happen.”

A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, Mark Hansen, also said that the city Republicans would play a significant role.

This is “primarily an issue of impact on Manhattan, and we look to our elected representatives of New York City to give us the input of their constituents on this project.”

Mr. Maltese said that this makes the four Republicans bulwarks against the expansion. He dismissed the United Nations Development Corporation’s measures to make the senators “understand the economic impact” of the building plan. “They treat us like economic idiots,” Mr. Maltese said. “We’re aware of the economic impact, but at the same time, that doesn’t override all of the other legitimate objections.”

He said that the U.N. had no viable alternative for relocation, and that threats of the economic damage the city would suffer in the event of a U.N. pullout were empty. “This is a land grab, and there simply is no argument for it,” he said. Mr. Maltese said that UNDC president, Roy Goodman, had tried to convince him to support the plan, and that he felt the Bloomberg administration was “gathering its forces.”

But “we’re pretty well set in our ways,” he said. “I can’t think of any new information that would cause us to change our positions.” His constituents, he said, had been extremely supportive of his stand, including the union officials he’d spoken with about potential construction jobs emerging from the development.

Mr. Goodman had also been in touch with Mr. Padavan, who cited the lack of financial specificity in the proposed bill as a reason for opposing it.

Mr. Padavan said he understood the economic arguments put forth by the UNDC, but that certain vital information – such as the fact that ownership of the new U.N. building would eventually transfer from the city to the United Nations – had not been spelled out in the original bill.

Poor communications from the legislation’s proponents, Mr. Padavan said, were partly to blame for the bill’s failure thus far.

But one highly placed official said that the bill approved only the planning process for the expansion plan, not the construction itself – and that therefore the legislation would not include as many specifics as if it were a fully formed development plan.

He also questioned Mr. Bruno’s and others’ arguments that the expansion would put city and state taxpayers at risk. He said that the debt service on the $600 million in bonds that would fund the construction would be paid by rent from the United Nations. The world body, he said, would be buying the building back in installments with each rent payment, adding that the U.N.’s record on rent payment “is stellar at this time.”

The official said that the oil-for-food matter was “irrelevant” to the question of U.N. development in Manhattan, and that such construction was a “win-win proposition” for the U.N. and New York, bringing the city a “tremendous stimulus to the job economy” that enjoyed, from his observations, the backing of labor unions and the construction industry.

Mr. Golden, however, said that while he understands these economic arguments, to him the U.N. expansion “is a matter of principle.” If other politicians can’t see that, he said, “then there’s something wrong with our leaders.”

Mr. Golden, like Messrs. Maltese and Padavan, had been contacted by Mr. Goodman. “But I’m not willing to discuss [the expansion] until Kofi Annan’s gone, and until the U.S. Senate has a chance to review those 55 documents,” referring to the internal U.N. audits sought by the Senate committee investigating the oil-for-food scandal.