As part of a $1.6 million mailing to voters in June, the City Council paid to print at least 400,000 direct-mail pieces that were never sent.

The mailings, which prominently featured photos of Council Speaker Gifford Miller, a Democrat who is running for mayor, were criticized by some watchdog groups after the speaker’s office announced that they had cost $1.6 million, rather than the $37,000 it had initially claimed. The number of pieces mailed was 5.8 million, rather than the “more than 100,000” a council spokesman had initially estimated.

While mailings of this kind have been sent in past years, critics say Mr. Miller was abusing his powerful position and misusing taxpayer dollars, an issue that could dog him in the coming months as his campaign moves into the final stretch before the September 13 primary.

Several council members have told The New York Sun since last Thursday that the brochures were too political and seemed to be promoting Mr. Miller. The brochures were sent out just before a blackout period that bars candidates from using their government office to send out mass mail in the 90 days leading up to an election.

A spokesman for Mr. Miller, Stephen Sigmund, insisted yesterday that the mailings did not cost more than $1.6 million and that both overruns and duplicate jobs were included in that amount – even if they were not itemized on the breakdown that the council distributed to the press last Thursday, when it announced the revised cost.

“There were extras printed as there are in any mailing,” he said. When asked why there were a number of jobs that were documented in the purchase orders, but not included on the council’s publicly released breakdown, he said it was “his understanding” that any of the jobs not listed were not sent out because the council did not want to risk violating the Campaign Finance Board’s 90-day blackout rule. He did not know how many fliers fell into that category, but a review of purchase orders conducted yesterday by The New York Sun found at least 400,000.

“They didn’t go out because we wanted to make sure everything was within the law,” he said.

The printing portion of the job was divided into 150 work orders, which were all kept under $5,000. Under city regulations, jobs valued at more than that amount must be bid out through a formal request-for-proposal process.

Council officials have said that the jobs had to split up because they were zoned by council districts and included pictures of the local council member alongside Mr. Miller.

Yet, records show that in one of the mailings – a glossy color pamphlet that outlined Mr. Miller’s education proposals – six separate jobs were identical because they included only a photo of the speaker, not the district’s council member. The printing costs on those jobs totaled more than $26,000, and under city regulations, they should have been consolidated and subjected to a competitive bidding process.

Mr. Sigmund said that the mailings could not be consolidated because they were going to different districts.

City regulations state that “a procurement shall not be artificially divided in order to meet the requirements of this section.” But according to council records, the education mailing was not the only case in which accounting methods appear to circumvent the formal RFP process and do just that.

A labeling company based in upstate New York, called Nicheware, was paid approximately $40,000 for producing mailing labels for the entire order of council fliers.

Council records show nine separate Nicheware invoices. Each of those included a different bundle of jobs costing between $3,891 and $4,917. There did not seem to be any clear pattern to how the jobs were bundled. The charges on one bill, for example, showed an order of labels for eight pamphlets, while another charged for 39. All nine bills, however, included only enough orders to keep the tally under the $5,000 threshold.

Mr. Sigmund defended the way the jobs were broken down, saying that the council had divvied up jobs in that fashion “long before Gifford Miller was speaker” and that it was a way to get the work done quickly and during the final phase of budget negotiations.

Council Member Simcha Felder, a Democrat who represents parts of Brooklyn, said he declined to participate in the mailings, but purchase orders indicate that two separate flyers – one focusing on Mayor Bloomberg’s budget cuts to cultural institutions and the other on the city’s “future” – were mistakenly printed with a photo of Mr. Felder and Mr. Miller.

The extra printing resulted in tens of thousands of fliers that went to waste. A spokesman for Mr. Felder, Ari Lipnik, said they did not know of any joint mailer that was sent from both the speaker and that council member. Mr. Felder, he said, did not authorize it in any case.

Mr. Lipnik said, “The councilman told the speaker, if he thought it was a positive piece he would consider it. But after seeing the draft, he thought it was negative and he didn’t think it merited his consideration.”

It was unclear yesterday how much the previous speaker, Peter Vallone Sr., spent on the council’s pre-budget mailings when he was running for mayor in 2001.