Relatively few landlords are complying with a key provision of the new law touted by the City Council as the answer to ending lead-paint poisoning of children.

The measure, passed over a mayoral veto, is one of the most stringent lead-paint laws in the country. Among other requirements, it says landlords of pre-1960 buildings must file notices with the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene when renovating an area of more than 100 square feet within an apartment. The notices trigger certain requirements for testing, certification of contractors, and other protective measures.

According to data from the department, only 291 such notices have been filed.

With 2.2 million pre-1960 apartments in New York, probably tens of thousands of the notices should have been filed, according to city officials and independent observers, who said the low number shows landlords’ failure to comply with the law.

“Landlords must file these notices for any paint jobs, repairs, or plumbing work, and given the variety of work they apply to, you would expect tens of thousands of these notices,” the special counsel to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Harold Shultz, told The New York Sun. “It shows that many landlords are not aware of the new law’s regulations or are purposefully not abiding by them.”

In addition, the number of apartment repairs being undertaken by city workers because landlords fail to perform them promptly has risen sharply.

The council overrode a veto, on a 44-5 vote, to enact Local Law 1 in December 2003. In opposing the legislation, Mayor Bloomberg argued that it would discourage rehabilitation of affordable housing by making more demands on landlords, increase the city’s and landlords’ exposure to liability lawsuits, and impose excessively short deadlines for compliance.

“Unfortunately, this bill still has several elements that are very troubling for the city,” Mr. Bloomberg wrote at the time. “The bill’s approach is in many respects unreasonable, perhaps unachievable, and in some instances, counterproductive.”

The law, which regulates lead dust as well as paint and puts more responsibility on landlords who have tenants with children under age 7, took effect in August 2004.

In its “statement of findings and purposes,” the council said it found that “blood lead levels among New York City children constitute a severe health crisis” and set the goal of “the elimination of childhood lead poisoning by the year 2010.”

The lead-paint law was introduced into the council in March 2002, but it was not considered until July 2003, when the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, overturned a lead abatement law the council adopted in 1999. In overturning the old law, the court said the council had failed to explain the potential effects on the environment and public health.

Lead paint is most prevalent in poorer neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, known collectively as the Lead Belt, and the debate over the bill took on racial overtones.

“Today, we give the children in the row houses of our city the same health protection as those who live in the townhouses of Manhattan,” Council Member Bill Perkins of Harlem, the chief sponsor of the legislation, said following the enactment of the new law.

Council Speaker Gifford Miller, who already was seen as a certain 2005 mayoral candidate, offered belated support for the bill, after being portrayed by some council colleagues as an Upper East Side politician who was insufficiently sensitive to issues affecting minority groups.

Neither Mr. Perkins nor Mr. Miller returned repeated calls for comment in connection with this article on the law’s effects.

The new law attempted to facilitate communication among city agencies, especially the Departments of Health and of Housing Preservation and Development, which is widely known as HPD. Notices regarding renovation of an area of more than 100 square feet in an apartment, as well as other renovations that could release lead dust, were sent to the Health Department, while enforcement issues were to be dealt with by HPD.

Under the new law, landlords have 21 days to fix a lead violation, and if they do not comply, HPD has 45 days to step in to fix the violation itself. In those instances, if the landlord does not reimburse the city for the cost of the abatement, the city files a lien on the property.

The number of such repairs that HPD has carried out nearly doubled, to 6,518 from August through February of this fiscal year, compared to 3,310 in the same period of the previous fiscal year.

“Because of the long, complicated reporting mandates that we have, inspection teams now complete a little over two inspections per day, compared with about nine or 10 a day before the law,” the director of HPD, Peter Lynn, said. “But at the same time we have increased our inspection staff by a third, to 400 people.”

The 291 notices filed with the Health Department for renovations of more than 100 square feet – or for removal of two or more windows – are the first public indicators that few landlords are complying with the stricter law, officials said.

“The city has long maintained that many provisions of the bill are very burdensome and problematic,” a spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg, Jordan Borowitz, said.

The mayor’s commissioner of housing preservation and development, Shaun Donovan, said: “What you see is that despite our efforts to educate tens of thousands of landlords, it is the small property owners, where lead paint is the most prevalent, who are the hardest to reach.”

The Lead Belt is made up of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick in Brooklyn, South Jamaica in Queens, and Mott Haven in the Bronx. According to the Health Department data, the most notices have been filed in the Bronx: 183. In Manhattan, where few buildings have been found to have lead paint, 58 were filed. In Brooklyn, 42 notices were filed, while in Queens there were only seven. In Staten Island there was only a single notice.

“Why there are so few notices, I don’t know. Maybe it is because the city has failed to educate enough of the landlords about the law, or is not sufficiently monitoring compliance of the law,” a staff attorney at the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, Mathew Cachere, said. Mr. Cachere, who represents the Coalition to End Lead Poisoning, was a major proponent of the lead paint law.

A nonprofit developer that supported enactment of the lead-paint bill, the Pratt Area Community Council, attributed the low numbers to a lag in education.

“It is just a matter of catch-up,” the Brooklyn-based group’s executive director, Deb Howard, said. “Landlords aren’t aware yet that they should be filing these notices, and it is natural that so soon after the law has been put in place, so few of the landlords have complied.”

An executive of the Community Preservation Corp., a mortgage lender for low- and middle-income housing, said many of the landlords who approached it for loans do not want to comply with the lead paint law’s strict regulations.

“Once we explain all the requirements to them, we never hear from them again, and this is especially true of landlords in small rental buildings in those areas where lead paint is the most prevalent,” its executive vice president, John McCarthy, said. “I assume they either don’t go through with the renovations, or get the money elsewhere where the requirements aren’t as strict.”

For a property-owner to comply with the lead-paint law, the tenants must move out while the apartment found to have lead paint is made safe.

“The apartment must remain vacant for months even, and it can be very expensive,” Mr. McCarthy said. “If it is a city project we have city subsidies along with our own financing to cover the landlord’s costs, but with non-city projects it can cost several thousand dollars, and landlords usually don’t have enough money.” That often means landlords decide against renovations they had planned because of the expense, despite the presence of potentially poisonous lead, Mr. McCarthy said.

“Lead paint has been a cumbersome and difficult law to implement, and I believe landlords are not rehabbing their buildings because of the difficulty, or are going around the law to do it,” Mr. McCarthy said, adding, “Either way, the tenants lose.”