The furniture industry is speaking out against a City Council bill to regulate and license furniture stores, saying the consumer fraud cases that prompted the legislation don’t represent the practices of the vast majority of the city’s furniture stores.

The bill, by a council member of Queens, Helen Sears, calls for the Department of Consumer Affairs to issue $350 licenses to all store owners and would give the commissioner the authority to revoke them if it is determined in court that a store broke its contract with a customer.

Ms. Sears said some furniture stores in the city have accepted deposits or full payment from customers but never delivered the purchases. When customers returned to the store to get their money back, she said, some stores refused to reimburse the buyers. In other instances, the stores shut down after the order was placed, she said.

“The fact is there are complaints, and the small consumer needs to be protected,” she said. “Consumer affairs responds to complaints,” but is not empowered to do anything about them, she said.

The executive director of the Greater New York Home Furnishings Association, Barbara Goldstein, said the bill, similar to an earlier effort that failed at City Hall, is “not going to fly.”

“There are always a couple of bad seeds, which is why they want to regulate,” she said. “I hate what happens when one store bastardizes the rest of the industry, because we have so many phenomenal, great stores out there.”

Ms. Goldstein said short of starting a new city department to oversee furniture stores, she’s not sure how the bill would be implemented.

“By the time you get done opening up a department, training a department, how well could this governing be done?” she said.

The legislation does not call for a new department to regulate the industry but would extend that authority to the commissioner of consumer affairs, Jonathan Mintz.

A spokeswoman for the department, Shira Krance, declined to comment on the bill. She said someone from the department would testify at the first hearing on the proposed legislation, scheduled for Thursday.

During fiscal 2006, the department received more than 800 complaints about furniture sales, up more than 40% from the previous year, according to a February news release on the department’s Web site. During that time, the department secured more than $3.6 million in restitution for consumers with complaints about a variety of industries, including furniture stores.

A senior vice president of the Better Business Bureau of Metropolitan New York, Walter Brewster, said New York State law protects consumers against fraud by furniture stores. The Department of Consumer Affairs is charged with enforcing the city’s consumer protection law.

“There is some structure for this and if a store refuses to do it, the law is on your side,” Mr. Brewster said.

The law requires furniture dealers to give customers a delivery date in writing, he said. If a delivery does not arrive on time, a customer can cancel the order, get a refund or credit, select new furniture, or schedule a new delivery date, he said. He suggested customers who can’t get their money back from a retailer contact the Department of Consumer Affairs.

“Basically you should have a range of fairly helpful alternatives offered to you,” he said. “You are not completely unprotected at this point.”