ALBANY – The minority parties of the Assembly and Senate, hoping to capitalize on the outcry for reform of state government, are stepping up the pressure for rules changes that would give them a greater voice in the Legislature.

Assembly Republicans announced yesterday that they will support a resolution sponsored by Assemblyman Scott Stringer, a Democrat of Manhattan, that would loosen the tight control of Speaker Sheldon Silver, also of Manhattan. The 46 GOP votes, when added to the 27 Democratic co-sponsors of Mr. Stringer’s resolution, put the measure close to the 76 votes it needs for passage.

In the Senate, minority Democrats called for the Republican majority leader, Joseph Bruno, to support similar reform in his house. They argued that their gains on Election Day – adding as many as four seats to their 24-member minority – are a sign that citizens want to see change in state government.

“It’s time for action now. The election’s over,” Senator John Sabini of Queens said. “Let’s hope people … aren’t going to play the ‘Let’s wait until the next crisis’ game and hope the voters forget. I don’t think they will.”

The senate minority leader, David Paterson of Harlem, called on Republicans to “keep their promise” by moving quickly on government reform and overriding Governor Pataki’s veto of a minimum-wage increase.

“Many Republican state senators facing tough re-election battles identified themselves as reformers,” he said in a statement yesterday. “Now we will see if these promises were sincere or election-year rhetoric.”

Changing the legislative rules has become a priority for many at the Capitol since the release this summer of a report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which called New York’s state government the most dysfunctional in the nation. It cited the fact that the Legislature has been late passing the budget 20 years in a row – setting a new record of four months and 11 days this year – and the lawmakers’ habits of negotiating behind closed doors, cutting short debate on major bills, and delegating decision-making power to a few top leaders.

Mr. Stringer’s resolution, based on recommendations from the Brennan Center, would, among other changes, make it harder for committees to bottle up controversial legislation, require members to be physically present in the chamber to vote, and give each member a minimum allowance for staff and office expenses rather than leaving that to the discretion of the speaker.

Each house separately approves its rules at the beginning of its two-year session in January. So far, there is no parallel to Mr. Stringer’s resolution in the Senate.

This morning, a Senate Government Reform Task Force appointed by Mr. Bruno in September will release a preliminary report and “lay out an ambitious agenda of reforms it will pursue through public hearings and legislative actions in the coming weeks.”

The task force report, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Sun, offers few clues about the Senate’s agenda going forward. Instead, it catalogues steps Senate Republicans have taken over the past 10 years to improve state government, ranging from Mr. Bruno’s efforts to keep a more punctual schedule to constitutional amendments changing the budget process that could go to voters next November.

The task force “will seek to build on these accomplishments and, much more, to continue to deliver better government to the citizens of the state,” according to an introduction by the cochairmen, Senator Frank Padavan of Queens and Senator Dale Volker of Erie County.

The report takes an expansive view of reform, discussing not just procedural rules in the Legislature but also the regulation of lobbyists, spiraling Medicaid costs, redundancy in local government, and a proposed constitutional amendment would pave the way for ballot initiatives in New York.

A spokesman for the Brennan Center, Scott Schell, said the task force should give making changes in the Senate rules its first priority.

“The Brennan Center is in no way looking to dampen progress on those [other] issues,” Mr. Schell said. “However, no one should understand the need for action on those things as an excuse for not doing legislative reform. If they’re saying we should not act on rules reform because we need to act on these other things, I would say that’s just a flat-out distraction.”

A spokesman for Mr. Bruno, John McArdle, said the Senate will propose changes in the legislative rules in the next few weeks.

“Do we anticipate implementing them in January? That’s a yes,” Mr. McArdle said.

Yesterday, Mr. Stringer said he welcomed the support from Assembly Republicans but predicted their votes will not ultimately be necessary to make rules changes happen.

“I honestly believe at the end of the day there’s going to be a reform proposal in the Assembly by the majority that will have way over 76 Democratic votes,” he said.

Today, the Senate is scheduled to convene its first session since August, but is not expected to act on the minimum-wage bill or any of Mr. Pataki’s other vetoes – including his 195 vetoes of $1.8 billion in spending and borrowing in the budget, and his veto on Monday of a budget-reform bill that the Legislature unanimously approved in June.

One bill it will take up authorizes the United Nations to study using a playground across from its headquarters for a redevelopment project, according to a spokesman for the Senate, Mark Hansen.

“It temporarily adds this land to the U.N. development district for consideration,” Mr. Hansen said. “Before anything is done with the land, they have to come back to the Legislature for approval.”

Senators of both parties are still waiting for the results of a recount in the Westchester County election between a Republican incumbent, Nicholas Spano, and a Democratic challenger, Andrea Stewart-Cousins. As of yesterday, Mr. Spano was leading by less than 200 votes with about 3,500 paper ballots still to be counted.

Democrats charged yesterday that lawyers for Mr. Spano were using information from a government-generated database to decide which ballots to challenge during the recount.

“Is this an isolated incident or are taxpayers subsidizing the recount in other ways as well?” a lawyer for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, Henry Berger, said yesterday. “We will be contacting the Albany County district attorney, and we want him to look into it.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Spano, Claire Wainwright, denied any wrong doing on the Republicans’ part.

“It’s not government-generated data,” she said. “Of course we keep files, but this is not coming from our government office.”

“We use information that is legally obtainable from the Board of Elections,” Mr. McArdle said. “The questions they’re raising are nonsense.”

If Mr. Spano wins, the Republican majority, which was 38-24 at the beginning of the year, will shrink to 35-27. If Ms. Stewart-Cousins prevails, the majority will be 34-28 – bringing the Democrats within four victories of ending the GOP’s decades-long dominance of the upper house.