Mayoral candidates can feel free to hold press conferences or have their pictures snapped at one of the city’s 52 outdoor swimming pools – but should they want to hand out fliers or shake hands on a platform at one of the city’s 468 subway stations, they’re out of luck.

Even as candidates for elected office in New York City reach out to voters with headline-catching policy ideas, they must follow a long string of rules. Some of those regulations are laws established by the City Charter and enforced by the city’s Campaign Finance Board and Conflicts of Interest Board, while others are guidelines established by individual city departments and agencies.

The laws are easy to find. In January, the city disseminated a reminder to employees about the conflicts-of-interest regulations, which force city workers to keep campaign activities out of their government offices. The laws also are available on the Internet.

The agency rules, however, are not published in any central book or database. Although they all have the same purpose – to keep agency employees from using government positions or resources to promote campaigns – they don’t look alike, and even veteran campaign workers sometimes get mixed up about what’s permitted and what’s not.

Recently, some of the most talked about rules have been those of the Fire Department.

According to the department’s deputy commissioner for public information, Francis Gribbon, elected officials and candidates for public office are free to visit fire stations to meet firefighters – even if the purpose of the visit is to hand out campaign fliers. The department also allows elected officials to use pictures of themselves in stations with uniformed firefighters in constituent mailings. Candidates, however, are forbidden from using pictures taken in stations and with uniformed firefighters.

“There would be a presumption of some kind of endorsement,” Mr. Gribbon said. “The Fire Department does not endorse political candidates.”

The Fire Department’s rules were in the news recently, when a campaign mailing emerged showing the Manhattan borough president, C. Virginia Fields, posed inside a fire station with uniformed firefighters. The picture was taken in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. A similar shot appearing in Mayor Bloomberg’s re-election materials was staged and showed off-duty firefighters wearing costumes instead of real uniforms.

When the firefighters’ unions make endorsements, Mr. Gribbon said, they typically seek permission from the department, which allows them to appear outside a firehouse, as long as they are not in uniform and not on duty.

The Police Department, too, forbids uniformed officers from appearing in pictures with candidates – just as it forbids officers from using department letterhead or other imagery, including the patch and the shield, for any purpose other than work.

“The mission of the department is to promote public safety and health and welfare,” a spokesman, Jason Post, said.

At municipal hospitals, elected officials may visit and even hold press conferences. Candidates are forbidden, however, from using the interiors of hospitals as the background for campaign literature, and from talking about politics at hospital-sponsored events.

This month, when Mr. Bloomberg received an endorsement from the Doctors Council, he stood outside Harlem Hospital, surrounded by doctors wearing white coats. The associate executive director of communications for the Health and Hospitals Corporation, Brian Palmer, said doctors shouldn’t wear clothes that make it appear that they’re representing the hospitals, but he said the corporation is not as strict about uniforms as the Police, Fire, and Sanitation departments are.

While Mr. Bloomberg’s endorsement and others like it might have the facade of the hospital in the background, Mr. Palmer said, the corporation makes no political endorsements.

“You cannot campaign on hospital property,” he said. He noted, though, that a city hospital does not control “public space that does not belong to the hospital, such as streets and sidewalks.”

The Department of Education has another interpretation of the conflicts rules.

It allows candidates to visit public schools until 60 days before an election, when they’re barred from the buildings. Even when they’re allowed to visit, they’re not allowed to hand out literature. Politicians are always forbidden from using school buildings as sites for rallies or other programs, and department rules make it nearly impossible to take pictures inside school buildings for campaign fliers.

“According to the regulation, a DOE employee, if found violating the regulation, faces disciplinary action,” a spokeswoman for the education department, Margie Feinberg, said. “If someone outside the DOE violates the regulation, then we decline their request in the future to use school space.”

New York City Transit allows candidates to shake hands, distribute literature, and take pictures on the nonplatform side of the turnstiles in subway stations or outside on the sidewalk. But a transit spokesman, Charles Seaton, said once New Yorkers swipe their MetroCards, they’re in a politics-free zone.

The rules are looser at the city’s Department of Transportation. Candidates may campaign and take pictures at any public facilities, including the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, a transportation spokesman, Chris Gilbride, said.

The same goes for facilities run by MetroNorth, but a spokeswoman, Marjorie Anders, said politicians “generally give us the courtesy of a heads-up.”

The rules are likewise permissive at the city’s parks.

A spokesman for the Department of Parks and Recreation, Warner Johnston, said politicians don’t need permits to hold press conferences. He said the only time campaigns need permission to appear at any of the parks, recreational centers, pools, or beaches run by the Parks Department is when they are setting up stages or putting on large-scale events.

Candidates can appear and talk to the elderly at the privately run senior centers supervised by the city’s Department for the Aging, a department spokesman, Christopher Miller, said. But he cautioned that although there’s no rule forbidding campaign photo shoots at senior centers, “seniors are very sensitive to media. It’s a good idea to ask them permission for use.”

A veteran campaign lawyer, Jerry Goldfeder, said that when he advises clients on the rules, he generally briefs them on the conflicts laws and then tells them to use common sense – and turn regularly to the First Amendment.

A lawyer at the New York Public Interest Research Group, Gene Russianoff, said activities that don’t break the letter of the law still have been known to raise suspicion and end up hurting politicians’ chances on Election Day.

“There is no fair campaign code practices in New York – basically, kind of anything goes,” he said. “It’s up to the political process that bites candidates if their literature raises questions.”