Mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer announced Monday that he wants to pay the city’s court-ordered 25% share of the court-ordered bill from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case by reinstating a stock-transfer tax. But there’s a problem with his rationale: The court never ordered the city to pay 25%.

On Monday, Mr. Ferrer said the 25% came from a court order. Yesterday morning, he maintained that the 25% originated in an order of the court. As long ago as April 12, he told The New York Sun in an interview, “The special masters have already recommended to the judge, and the judge I think said 25%. Are we going to put ourselves in a position of defying an order of the court?” When the Sun questioned the figure, Mr. Ferrer asked if his interlocutor believed in “the rule of law.”

The judge in the equity case, Justice Leland DeGrasse of state Supreme Court at Manhattan, endorsed the recommendation of court-appointed special referees in February, ordering that Albany allocate billions of dollars more to the city’s public schools. Neither the judge nor the special referees, however, weighed in on the percentage of the bill the city should pay.

Yesterday, Mr. Ferrer’s Democratic opponents and New York City’s Republican mayor condemned Mr. Ferrer for basing his first major policy announcement on a faulty premise.

The Manhattan borough president, C. Virginia Fields, told the Sun: “He put it out there, saying that because the court ordered this, this is the reason why he is proposing it. Now, the court did not order it. Retract.”

She said the proposal would put the city in a “very, very inappropriate position” in terms of bargaining with state officials over the education money.

Another mayoral candidate, Rep. Anthony Weiner, acknowledged the city might have to pay some portion of the court-ordered financing package, but he said that doesn’t mean the city should offer up billions of dollars.

“My view is that we should not be negotiating against ourselves,” he said. “I think that we should not be putting the idea on the table that the city is prepared to pay for the CFE decision. It may happen, but we shouldn’t be so eager to make it so.”

At a press conference, when reporters asked Mayor Bloomberg about Mr. Ferrer’s 25% proposal, he said: “You can’t complain that we don’t fight in Albany enough and then say, ‘We’ll just give in.’ I don’t know how it’s going to come out, but I’m going to fight as hard as I can to make sure that the monies we already send to Albany are the monies that go to fund the improvement in the school system that we need.”

In the late afternoon, a Ferrer campaign official, who spoke with the Sun on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Ferrer “understands” that the court did not order the city to pay 25% of the $14.3 billion bill for New York City school operations in the next five years, despite the candidate’s repeated statements. Instead, the official said, the candidate drew the 25% from an informal recommendation by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the independent group that brought the suit.

“What he meant when he said that is because of the court order, because of the special masters, because of the decision by Judge DeGrasse in the Supreme Court, there is a process that’s going forward in which the 25% is the operating principle today for resolving this lawsuit,” the campaign aide said.

The aide would not say why Mr. Ferrer did not choose to base his proposal on the recommendation of the state Education Department, which was for a more modest 18% city contribution. The aide also didn’t directly answer a question of whether Mr. Ferrer would be willing to have the city put up more than 25%.

Meanwhile, Governor Pataki followed through Monday on a promise to appeal Judge DeGrasse’s order.

Today, however, lawyers for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity plan to ask the court to lift a stay, which went into effect when the appeal was filed.

That would reinstate a deadline, which has 65 days remaining, for Albany lawmakers and the governor to resolve the matter.