The city’s Department of Transportation is poised to make an announcement that will mean the end of the plain Plexiglas bus shelters, metal mesh trash cans, and sometimes-shabby newsstands that line New York’s sidewalks.

The $1 billion coordinated “street furniture” franchise to be awarded in the next few weeks to one of three finalists – Cemusa, JCDecaux, and Van Wagner Outdoor – is one of the biggest and longest-anticipated contracts in the city’s history, and is likely to change the streetscape of the five boroughs for decades to come.

Like most stories in New York, the street furniture story didn’t start in the past year, or even in the last 10 years. It began more than a dozen years ago, when Mayor Dinkins pushed the idea of establishing a street furniture franchise as a way of bringing pay toilets onto the city sidewalks. He launched an experimental toilet program, trying out the wares of JCDecaux on city streets. Momentum for the plan fizzled, however. The same, minus the toilets, happened under Mayor Giuliani.

In Mayor Bloomberg’s first year at City Hall, he followed his predecessors, diving into the street furniture morass. He proposed a deal under which a company would design, install, and maintain new furniture, in exchange for the right to keep most of the revenue it raises by selling advertising space on the furniture’s surface – a type of arrangement that is common throughout the world.

In 2003, the City Council passed a bill setting the stage for the Department of Transportation’s request for proposals. The bill called for 3,300 bus shelters, 330 newsstands, and 20 pay toilets, as well as other fixtures, such as trash cans and information kiosks outfitted with computers.

Bidders submitted their proposals to the department last August. Last spring, a design advisory committee presented its secret recommendations to the department’s evaluation commission. Since then, the seven-member commission has been evaluating the proposals behind closed doors. The commission is made up of unnamed representatives from, in addition to the transportation department, the Departments of Design and Construction, City Planning, Parks and Recreation, and Consumer Affairs, as well as the city’s Economic Development Corporation.

As the anticipated early-September announcement approaches, it appears that the process is reaching its final stages, but not without a few hiccups and a few remaining questions about litigation, business ethics, and decision-making principles.

Topping the list of hiccups is a pending lawsuit in state Supreme Court brought against the city by the New York City Newsstand Operators Association. The trade group claims that newsstands should not be included in the new contract at all.

“Newsstands are not street furniture. They’re people’s business,” a lawyer who represents the group, Robert Bookman, said. “They’re applied for and approved by the city, but the structures are paid for by the moms and pops, and they own them. The city has, without permission, included all the newsstands in their street furniture contract.” He added that if the city takes over the stands, the current owners will no longer own their own places of business and won’t be able to bring in any advertising revenue.

Mr. Bookman is hoping a judge will issue a last-minute injunction to stop the city from including newsstands in the contract. At this point, however, the Department of Transportation is expected to announce its decision before the anticipated September 15 court ruling.

Another problem that has been raised in the past year concerns one of the companies in the running, JCDecaux.

A member of the City Council, Alan Gerson, wrote a letter to the transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall, in December detailing a list of allegations against the French firm, dating back to the early 1990s. Recently, the letter has resurfaced, accompanied by a thick packet of news clippings detailing the company’s alleged brushes with the law.

A lawyer representing JCDecaux, Edward Wallace, said the alleged ethical gaffes detailed in the letter, such as “laundering local money” in Belgium and “bribing officials” in Spain, are baseless. He said other claims are true but are not considered crimes in America and also happen to be ancient history.

For example, JCDecaux was fined $100,000 in Bordeaux, France, in 1992 because after the company was awarded the contract to create a new town clock, the town decided the contract shouldn’t have been awarded on a sole-source basis. The company said that in America the contract would have been voided. A private investigation by the city of Los Angeles in 2002 reached the same conclusion about the Bordeaux events.

Mr. Wallace also brushed aside a $12.2 million fine, imposed on JCDecaux last month by a French commission on competition, which decided the company was acting as a monopoly.

“JCDecaux has an outstanding 40-year record of quality design and maintenance of street furniture throughout the world. San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles have thoroughly investigated each of these allegations and have concluded that JCDecaux has the necessary integrity to be awarded important contracts. Repeating baseless accusations do not render them any less false.”

Although JCDecaux representatives declined to discuss their bid or the company’s merits, they provided information about the company, including a glowing review, written by a faculty team at Harvard Business School, of its four-decade record of street furniture innovation.

The general counsel for public works in Los Angeles, Christopher Westhoff, who was involved in that city’s street furniture bidding process in 2002, called the furniture that JCDecaux installed in Los Angeles “well done and tasteful.” Plus, he said, the public toilets are popular and well-maintained.

Both other companies in the running are smaller and less experienced in the world of street furniture than is JCDecaux, the second biggest street furniture firm in the world. But they say they are well-qualified for the job.

The chief executive officer of Cemusa North America, Toulla Constantinou, said her Spain-based company would be the best choice because its sole focus is on street furniture – not other outdoor structures such as billboards – and it therefore could bring more advertising revenue to the city. She said whoever wins the contract would possess the “crown jewel” of the street furniture empire.

“New York is the best advertising market in the world,” she said, “so, for any company, it’s going to be a huge contract from an advertising prospect.”

The chief operating officer of Van Wagner, Mark Johnston, had similar thoughts.

“To any of the companies, this contract is a significant opportunity,” Mr. Johnston said. “New York is the most important city in the world.”

Mr. Johnston said his company was ideally suited to the job because it’s the only one based in New York – and, as the provider of many pay phones in the city, it is intimately familiar with how to get around and how to get things done. He added that one of New York’s most prominent architects, whom he declined to identify, designed the street furniture that Van Wagner would build.

“We think we would do a great job,” he said.

Despite some persistent questions, civic groups are looking forward to decision day and the new look for city streets that will follow.

The director of special projects at the Municipal Art Society, Vanessa Gruen, who was a member of the design advisory committee, said her group has been pressing the city to clean up its street furniture for more than a decade. She said any of the designs would “improve the streetscape immensely.”

“Doesn’t it make you feel better when you walk down the street and everything is attractive and cleaned?” Ms. Gruen said. “It’s nice to have a beautiful city, and the streets are our largest public space.”

Once the announcement is made, the city will start the process of vetting the winning firm.

The general counsel at the mayor’s office of contract services, Elisa Velazquez, said that because companies are granted due process, there are no hard-and-fast rules that can disqualify vendors for past problems with the law. She said each agency can decide what it is comfortable with, after conducting what’s known as a “responsibility determination,” a vetting process that follows the selection of the contractor. During the responsibility determination, agencies are supposed to ensure that vendors can meet all of the city’s standards.

Inspecting answers on Vendor Information Exchange System forms – the system is known by the acronym Vendex – is part of that process. Currently, all three of the street furniture firms in the running have submitted to the city the questionnaires, which require disclosure of any past investigations of the company and its principals, any bankruptcy proceedings initiated by or against the company in the past seven years, and any instances in the past decade of a felony or any crime related to truthfulness or business conduct by the company or its principals.

Only one company’s form, Cemusa’s, is publicly available because that company filed it independently with the Mayor’s Office on Contract Services in addition to the Department of Transportation.

In theory, the department could decide, after the decision is announced, that the selected company does not meet the agency’s standards. People familiar with the competition said that was unlikely to happen.

After the agency’s vetting process, the city comptroller has the ability to object to a contract if he feels the bidding process was somehow corrupted or if he deems the winning company corrupt. The mayor has the right to override that objection, as Mr. Bloomberg did when Comptroller William Thompson Jr. objected to a lack of openness in the Snapple franchise award. The final step is a review by the city’s Franchise and Concession Review Committee, a group with representatives of the mayor, a borough president, and the comptroller.