A City Council member from Queens, Tony Avella, is planning to introduce a bill requiring future council candidates to live in the district they are seeking to represent for at least one year prior to Election Day. He said the legislation is designed to prevent a repeat of the special election blunder in Brooklyn’s District 40.

“Living in the district gives you a credible stake in what happens in that neighborhood, as well as knowing what the issues are,” Mr. Avella said yesterday. “I truly believe that should be a requirement, and I don’t think one year of residency is asking too much.”

On Friday, Mayor Bloomberg called for a second special election in the central Brooklyn district after the winner of the first, Mathieu Eugene, refused to cooperate with a council investigation to determine if he was living in the district on Election Day, a requirement to hold office.

The first special election, held February 20, cost $380,470, and the second, scheduled for April 24, is expected to cost the same. Dr. Eugene said last week he is planning to run again.

Any repeat candidates seeking public funds from the New York City Campaign Finance Board are required to open new campaign committees, new bank accounts, and begin fund raising for the second campaign from scratch. The campaign finance board doled out $304,244 in public funds to candidates in the last election.

“It really is a waste of taxpayers’ money,” Mr. Avella said. “We should make sure this never happens again.”

An adjunct professor at Fordham Law School, Jerry Goldfeder, said the council has the authority to change the city charter to require council candidates to live within the district they want to represent for a fixed period of time before the election.

If candidates were required to live within the district for six months prior to an election, for example, it would allow plenty of time for challenges to a candidate’s residency to be dealt with in the courts long before Election Day, he said.

Council Member Simcha Felder, chairman of the Governmental Operations Committee, said in a statement yesterday that he’s not yet sure how the council can eliminate “that gray area” of election law through legislation, a reference to the confusion among some candidates in last month’s special election about when they were required to move into the district.

“It is important that we do what we are able to do in order to prevent these types of misunderstandings from happening again in the future,” he said.