Soon after her election as City Council speaker in January, Christine Quinn proclaimed changes in council policy aimed at making the body more transparent and responsive to citizens.

The moves made it easier for lawmakers to bring bills to the floor for votes and to propose amendments. Ms. Quinn’s decision to tout “reform” so early in her term endeared her to civic groups that had long pushed for such changes and worried that the new speaker would usher in business as usual after being anointed largely by the veteran Democratic Party bosses in Brooklyn and Queens.

As she nears the end of her first year in office, Ms. Quinn has pursued — and successfully implemented — a number of “good government” improvements, but her overall record on reform issues is uneven. While the speaker has drawn widespread praise for her effort to transform the city’s budget process and the council’s passage of a bill restricting political contributions by lobbyists, her resistance to change on other issues, such as lucrative stipends for council leaders, has disappointed some government watchdogs.

“It’s a mixed bag,” the staff attorney for the New York Public Interest Research Group, Gene Russianoff, said of Ms. Quinn’s efforts to improve the council. He praised the speaker for passing the lobbying bill in May, which banned most gifts from lobbyists, prohibited their donations from receiving public matching funds, and increased penalties for related violations.

But Mr. Russianoff noted that the measure could have gone further, and he criticized Ms. Quinn for allowing the council to vote its members a 25% raise last month while doing nothing to limit stipends — or “lulus” — for committee chairmen or the ability of lawmakers to collect outside income, as NYPIRG and other civic groups had advocated.

“In the end, they took the money and ran away from reform,” Mr. Russianoff said.

Council members now earn a base salary of $112,500 a year, but the position is considered part-time, and there are few restrictions on their receiving extra income on the side. Ms. Quinn has shown little public interest in restricting outside income, and she has defended the stipend system. A mayoral commission in October urged action on both fronts.

The executive director of the Citizens Union, Dick Dadey, said he hadn’t lost hope that the speaker would act on the lulus and part-time status. “I saw that as a missed, but not yet lost, opportunity,” he said.

Mr. Dadey lauded the speaker’s “reform” efforts to date. “Given that the deal to elect her speaker was made behind closed doors, she has exceeded expectations with regard to bringing needed reforms and improvements to the operations of the City Council and city government,” he said.

The speaker’s efforts have generally drawn praise from her colleagues. A freshman lawmaker who is the co-chairman of a council “rules reform” task force, Daniel Garodnick, said Ms. Quinn has been a “reform-minded speaker.”

Ms. Quinn’s next test will be campaign finance regulations. With an eye toward reining in so-called pay to play activity, the Campaign Finance Board in September called on the council to pass legislation regulating contributions from people “doing business” with the city, along with bans on donations from businesses and unions, and other changes.

Good-government groups are watching closely how the council handles the recommendations, along with suggestions from some members to streamline or expedite the process by which candidates can get access to public campaign dollars. A hearing on campaign financing is scheduled for Thursday. “If the council undermines the effectiveness of the board, it’ll chip away at Chris’s reputation as a reformer,” Mr. Russianoff said.

In an interview last week, Ms. Quinn said the council was not targeting the board. “I’ve not heard people criticize the campaign finance board for necessarily the decisions it makes, but I’ve heard criticism that it takes too long to get the decision,” she said. Candidates, she added, “need to get answers back in a timely fashion, so their attempt to super-adhere to the program doesn’t penalize their campaign. I think that’s not in any way, shape, or form about watering down power.”

The speaker’s most aggressive and sustained push for change has come on the city budget, which she is continuing into next year. Ms. Quinn cites as her proudest “reform” accomplishment the securing of permanent funding for summer jobs and libraries in June, which a significant win in her campaign to end what lawmakers call the “budget dance,” in which the council and administration annually haggle over the fraction of the municipal budget comprised of council initiatives.

Ms. Quinn also last month announced the council would begin identifying the names of lawmakers behind “member items” in a move that came on the heels of a court ruling that required such disclosure by the state Legislature. The council had been considering the change for months, she said in the interview.

“Certainly the ruling sped up our announcement of that,” she said.

In another new twist to the budget process, the speaker is holding a series of “community conversations” in each borough over the next several weeks aimed at seeking input for average New Yorkers on funding priorities. While some have speculated the forums are ways for Ms. Quinn to gain exposure in advance of a possible mayoral run, she insists the council is merely looking to know “what New Yorkers want their money spent on, and what they don’t their money spent on.”