In the last fiscal year, the City Council doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to companies it doesn’t have registered contracts with, for everything from printing services to consulting fees to electronics.

The council’s spending habits were propelled into the public eye when the body’s speaker, Gifford Miller, who is also running for mayor, was widely criticized for paying $1.6 million in government money for a June series of mass mailings that many said looked more like Miller campaign brochures than government newsletters.

The New York Sun obtained a list of the council’s expenditures for fiscal year 2005 from the office of the city comptroller, William Thompson Jr., through a Freedom of Information Act request. The document offers a window into which people and firms the council hires as consultants, which companies it pays for services, which delis and restaurants it favors, and what it buys. The list reads a lot like a long and very expensive credit card bill.

Though the council spent roughly a quarter of its non-salary, non-rent budget on printing and mailing fees, it also sprinkled its money around locally owned restaurants, pest-control companies, and cleaning services citywide, and its members shelled out public cash at such places as the popular Lower Manhattan store J&R Electronics, where the year’s bills came to roughly $50,000.

Over the course of the year that ended June 30, the council paid $16,050 to Soul Fixins’, a soul-food restaurant on West 34th Street; $9,697 to the Coney Island Deli; $7,325 to a Dominican restaurant called El Viejo Yayo on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, and $2,274 to the Guyana Restaurant & Bakery, also in Brooklyn.

The co-owner of Soul Fixins’, Eric Berry, said he’s catered a number of council and city events in the past five or six years, including Black History Month celebrations and, during the Giuliani administration, some mayoral dinners. His last council event, he said, had a menu of fried chicken, macaroni salad, collard greens, and cornbread.

“I don’t get into the politics of it,” Mr. Berry said. “We get a call from somebody and we answer the call.”

Council members also paid a handful of exterminators, including Kings Pest Control, which got $1,532; and several cleaning companies, including Maid in New York, which got $4,736, and spent thousands of dollars with dozens of publications, ranging from the New York Times and the Congressional Quarterly to the Greek News and Jewish Week.

According to the comptroller’s records, the council’s $15.2 million non-salary spending budget last year included $4.7 million for office space across the street from City Hall and some fixed expenses like phones and utilities. Beyond that, its largest payments – roughly $2.5 million worth – went to the printing companies that produced the most recent mass mailings as well as newsletters and other materials throughout the fiscal year.

The costs of the latest mass mailing, including postage, absorbed more than 10% of that non-salary spending. Because the “budget mailing” was broken into more than 150 separate jobs and never put out for a competitive bid, it led to questions about how the 51-member body spends the taxpayers’ money and whether it bothers to get the best deal.

While the council is not bound by the same purchasing rules that must be observed by mayoral agencies, it has adopted its own strict guidelines about competitive bidding. And city regulations require all agencies – for purposes of auditing, the council is classified as an agency – to register contracts with the comptroller’s office if the transactions come to $25,000 or more annually.

That requirement provides a measure of independent oversight. Although the council has nearly 80 active contracts registered with Mr. Thompson’s office, many of the vendors with which it spent more than $25,000, including almost all of the printing companies, are absent from the list.

A company called Color Graphics, for example, was paid $424,286 for council work; Metro Graphics was paid $538,128; Creative Litho Systems took in $280,538; JM Envelope Company got $236,223, and Copy Photo Print got $44,286. Jon-Da Printing was the only company in the batch with a registered contract, but it was for $16,500, and the council paid Jon-Da a total of $557,899 in the fiscal year, ac cording to the invoice list.

Officials at the council insisted that they followed the letter of the law. They said the majority of the vendors they used were chosen through a competitive bidding process, and one that in some cases is more stringent than city rules require. They also argued that registered contracts are not necessary for every vendor that is paid $25,000 or more, because most purchases are made piecemeal by individual members, and because the council often uses state or city contractors.

A spokesman for the comptroller’s office, Jeff Simmons, declined to comment, saying his office’s regular quadrennial audit of the council was scheduled for the fall. Mr. Thompson told the Sun last month, however, that he had “concerns” about how the council divided the jobs on its $1.6 million mass mailing and his office would be looking into that as part of its scheduled audit.

The president of the independent watchdog Citizens Union, Dick Dadey, said that though the law doesn’t require it, contracts should be in place whenever repeat business is conducted with a vendor, even for small purchases where only a few thousand dollars is spent at a time.

“When there’s a pattern of ongoing and regular use of a single vendor to provide a similar service throughout the course of a year, it would be appropriate to have a contract registered,” Mr. Dadey said. “The law doesn’t require that, but that’s a flaw in the law that should be corrected.”

Failing to register a contract does not necessarily mean the council didn’t use competitive bidding, but without having the council dig out documentation of each arrangement, it is impossible to know how vendors were selected. The registration process is designed to make those arrangements more transparent, to weed out corruption, and to ensure that public money is used effectively.

Mr. Miller’s chief of staff, Charles Meara, said that while the council did not bid out the latest mass mailing, it had selected the printing companies through a competitive process for work they did earlier in the year. He said that while the council generally follows city procurement rules, the law allows it to use its discretion. He also noted that even the regulations for mayoral agencies do not require competitive bidding for small purchases.

“I can’t imagine that we would bid out every time we had to order coffee and doughnuts,” Mr. Meara said.

In its slew of expenditures, the council paid dozens of consultants throughout the year, a standard practice for legislative bodies that rely on experts to guide them through issues it writes laws about.

Branford Communications – a consulting firm that two judicial candidates accused Democrat Party bosses in Brooklyn of pressuring them to hire – was paid $39,348. Council officials said several members hired the firm for various work throughout the year.

The council’s highest-profile consultant may have been the former schools chancellor Anthony Alvarado, who was chosen by Mr. Miller to head a 13-member commission that made recommendations on how to spend billions of dollars in court-mandated state money that the city expects to receive for its public schools.

Though Mr. Miller announced that Mr. Alvarado would head the commission and the council registered the contract with the comptroller’s office, the council’s news releases did not say that he would be paid for his work. Mr. Alvarado received $75,000 from the council.

Recommendations made by the commission, particularly one to reduce the numbers of students in public school classes, have become the centerpiece of Mr. Miller’s mayoral campaign – so much so that he pushed to make it a ballot question in November and petitioned to establish a political party called Smaller Class Sizes.

Mr. Meara said the council never hid the fact that Mr. Alvarado would be paid and said the commission’s work was “completely independent” of the speaker. There is nothing wrong with using its ideas for the betterment of the city’s public schools, he said.

“I don’t think it’s inappropriate to use their recommendations,” Mr. Meara said. “People in government have staff who work for them to come up with good ideas. The mayor does – everyone does.”

Aside from its lawyers, council members gave money to dozens of civic organizations, nonprofit groups, churches, and schools throughout the city, in amounts generally between $100 and $500. Council officials said the payments were probably journal advertisements taken out by members, or tickets for events.

The council’s $47.8 million budget is only a thin sliver of the city’s $50 billion budget. In 1996, the city’s budget was $32.3 billion and the council’s was $31.5 million.

Though the comptroller’s office does audit the council every four years, the last two audits concentrated on the City Clerk’s office, which is technically part of the council. The upcoming audit will be the first of the council proper in more than a decade.