Bet the Yankees at your local bodega. Play the spread on the Super Bowl at the Off-Track Betting parlor around the corner. Call in a wager on the Knicks from your couch.

That is the vision of a City Council member, Tony Avella, who plans to introduce a resolution in the council next month that he said could compel state legislators to consider legalizing gambling on professional and college sporting events. The goal is to tax a chunk of the estimated $30 billion wagered in New York on sports events each year, Mr. Avella, a Democrat of Queens, said, and to steer the proceeds away from bookies allied with organized-crime figures and instead pump the money into the state’s underfinanced education system.

“There’s been a tendency not to discuss gambling issues. We’re trying to get the discussion started,” Mr. Avella said of his proposal, which is still in the drafting stages.

While many lawmakers have bristled at the idea of taking on another bookmaking business, along with the troubled Off Track Betting Corporation, Mr. Avella has the backing of at least one high-profile law enforcement official, the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes, who has repeated his support for legalized sports gambling.

Countering the argument that having state-sponsored sites for sports bets would spurn more gamblers and fuel gambling addictions, Mr. Hynes has said the gamblers who would wager legally on sports events are generally betting even when it isn’t legal. Their wagers, he argued, like the billions wagered on horses in New York each year, might as well be taxed.

Mr. Hynes, who is seeking re-election to a fifth term this year, has also argued that sports bets have long represented a “cash cow” for members of organized crime, who not only get a cut from the betting but also make usurious profits from loan-sharking activity with bettors. Why fuel the mob by keeping bookmaking illegal when the city can book the bets itself and win money for schools, Mr. Hynes has argued.

Behind the push to legalize betting on sports in New York is one of the city’s leading business advocates, Kathryn Wylde, president of Partnership for New York – a group that counts as its partners such corporate giants as Microsoft and American Express. In an interview with The New York Sun last week, Ms. Wylde said she began looking into the idea of regulating sports bets soon after the court-appointed special masters in the decade-old lawsuit against the state by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity made its recommendation. That recommendation, accepted Monday by Justice Leland DeGrasse of state Supreme Court in Manhattan, was to require the state to increase spending on the city’s public schools by more than $5 billion a year.

Faced with the prospect that taxes would be raised to pay for the gaps in education or that social services would be slashed, Ms. Wylde said, her group was “looking at all alternatives.” Currently, she said, gambling on sports represents “an underground economy that fuels tax-avoidance.”

So far, federal laws allow four states – Nevada, Delaware, Oregon, and Montana – to book bets on sports. Offshore Internet sites have also become an area where bets can be placed through computers around the world, further enfeebling state laws against sport bets, Ms. Wylde said.

Lawmakers of New Jersey have already introduced legislation in the state Assembly that would make gambling on professional sports, but not college sports, legal. Should New Jersey allow sports gambling, even more potential tax revenue would be lost across state borders, Ms. Wylde said.

Despite the obvious economic benefits of taxing the billions of dollars bet on sports, however, Mr. Avella’s proposal will be a tough sell in Albany, if it makes it that far.

Already, Governor Pataki has supported a different sort of state-sanctioned gambling to raise money for the government: video lottery terminals, or “video slots.” The governor has opposed state-supervised sports betting.

A spokesman for the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, Tom Grey, said that for law-enforcement officials such as Mr. Hynes to endorse sports gambling was “dangerous” and elected officials should “know better” than to introduce laws that would “feed an addiction.”

Concerns about sports fixing, especially involving college athletes, have also been raised. Older New Yorkers remember that half a century ago, the City College basketball program was one of the country’s finest until it was devastated by a point-shaving scandal.

Even one of the country’s most recognized gamblers, Amarillo Slim, is against states taking over the bookie trade.

“It is all hypocritical,” the 74-year old told the Sun from his ranch in Amarillo, Texas.

In theory, he said, in sanctioning sports bets, law enforcement officials are acknowledging that gambling is an acceptable practice, taxing it, and then monopolizing the industry by prosecuting private bookmakers.

Besides, he said, sports gambling parlors in New York would do little to discourage loan-sharking, because making a wager with someone else’s money is part of the gamble.

“There’s always more than one way to skin a cat,” he said, “and if somebody wants to find another way, chances are he’s a gambler.”