Earlier this month, it looked as though Mayor Bloomberg’s plan for revamping the way garbage moves out of the city was headed for the trash.

In a political Hail Mary, the speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller – who also is campaigning for the mayor’s job – managed to cobble together enough votes to reject the zoning approvals Mr. Bloomberg needed to rebuild the trash-transfer facilities his plan hinged on.

Yesterday, however, in a rare occurrence at City Hall, it became clear that Mr. Miller would not have the votes needed for a veto override today when the legislative clock runs out.

In abandoning the fight, the council, which has 48 Democrats among its 51 members, hands the Republican mayor a political victory and paves the way for the administration to use the facilities of its choosing – including a much-criticized one on the Upper East Side at 91st Street that is in Mr. Miller’s district.

Though the 20-year plan for garbage disposal still has not yet been approved, yesterday’s development puts an end to the lobbying of council members by both the speaker and the mayor. Barring litigation, it shifts the debate to other components of the plan.

“It’s a fair plan in that every borough is basically responsible for their own solid-waste removal,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters yesterday morning.

The city is attempting to fix what everyone agrees is a broken system for dealing with the 50,000 tons of garbage the city churns out daily. The existing plan is one City Hall backed into after Mayor Giuliani – making good on a promise to his Republican base in Staten Island – closed the huge Fresh Kills landfill there in 2001. The facility had been accepting all of the city’s trash.

Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal calls for shipping garbage out of the city by barge rather than truck it out. In addition to the 91st Street station, it calls for three other city-owned stations to be rebuilt and reopened. Two of those stations are in Brooklyn – one at Gravesend, the other at Sunset Park – and the third is in Queens. Trash would be trucked to those facilities, packed into containers, loaded onto barges, and shipped to landfills in other parts of the country.

Nineteen council members sided with the mayor’s initiative, saying it was more equitable because it spread the burden of handling trash more evenly between poor communities in the outer boroughs and wealthy areas such as the Upper East Side. Many of Mr. Bloomberg’s council allies on the issue are black and Hispanic members who said their communities are already suffering with high rates of asthma and other ailments that can be exacerbated by environmental factors.

Mr. Miller and his camp argued that the 91st Street Marine Transfer Station should not be used because it is in a residential area, where lines of garbage trucks would be unacceptable. Last week the speaker offered a compromise plan that would make use of the site, but only for paper recycling.

Mr. Miller, who is being forced off the council this year by term limits, said in a statement that the mayor had “refused to negotiate a comprehensive and responsible plan.” Insisting on approvals for the sites before even negotiating a plan was putting “the garbage cart before the horse,” he said. He also vowed to fight other aspects of the plan and implement alternatives with legislation if the mayor again refused to negotiate.

“I have proposed a more sensitive approach that would dramatically reduce waste, increase recycling, decrease incineration, shorten truck trips, and close down commercial transfer stations in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn,” Mr. Miller said.

Council Member Michael McMahon, chairman of the council’s sanitation committee and a backer of Mr. Miller’s mayoral bid, predicted that the site plan would be challenged and eventually defeated.

“They won this battle, but I think it’s a Pyrrhic victory,” Mr. McMahon said. “This will be years in litigation. The sites they’ve chosen are vehemently opposed in the community.”

Indeed, the Gracie Point Community Council’s president, Anthony Ard, said the group, which was established to fight the reopening of the 91st Street station, would use “every resource” to demonstrate that the area is inappropriate for a “10-story, 24-hour, six-day-per-week garbage dump.”

Rumors were swirling yesterday that the developer Donald Trump, who owns a substantial swath of land along the West Side riverfront near the 59th Street station, which the mayor wants to convert from a recycling facility to a residential and commercial garbage station, was angry too. A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, Norma Foerderer, declined to quote her boss directly but said he seemed to be “unhappy.”

The council members who supported the plan said that it would be a good starting point and that they had been given assurances the administration would negotiate.

“Every day that we stick with this old rotten system, it’s a terrible disservice to New Yorkers,” a Democrat of Brooklyn, David Yassky, said.

Another Brooklyn member, Letitia James, said voting to uphold the veto was “a vote for children in my district who are suffering alarmingly high rates of asthma.”

“It’s a half of a plan – it doesn’t deal with the commercial – but a half a plan is better than nothing at all,” she said.

When asked how significant the blow was for Mr. Miller politically, Ms. James, who has criticized the speaker on many issues, said: “I think it says something about his leadership.”