With an estimated 6,000 illegal vendors, a confusing maze of laws and judicial decisions governing street merchants, and a host of angry retail groups, it is clear the city’s current system of regulating vendors has problems. Less clear is what the solution might be.

“The no. 1 issue that has come forward before this committee is vending,” the chairman of the City Council’s Consumer Affairs Committee, Philip Reed, said. “Nobody is satisfied. Nobody thinks what is on the books is fair.”

Mr. Reed, a Democrat of Manhattan, introduced a law last week that would repeal most of the current local vendor legislation to create a more uniform set of regulations. Among other changes, it would open up additional streets to vending and would limit vendors to six a block, which Mr. Reed called “fair and comprehensible, understandable and enforceable.”

But Mr. Reed appeared just about the only person to think so yesterday.

At the first hearing on the proposed overhaul, vendors and business owners alike attacked it.

The most vocal criticism came from a contingent of more than 100 so-called “First Amendment vendors” – merchants of written material or art – who currently have special vending access. The law would require them to gain licenses, placing them in a larger category with non-food merchants and subjecting them to the overall limit. Of the six vendors on a block, or three on a block face, there would be one food vendor, one First Amendment vendor, and one general vendor, according to the proposal. If the three were not available there could be multiple types of the same vendor. Disabled veterans, who have special vending privileges, would continue to have priority space.

Although the proposal would result in fewer vendors on certain blocks, it would expand opportunities for vendors by increasing licenses and opening up nearly every street and avenue to vending, with the exception of the area surrounding the World Trade Center site. The permit increase of authorized general vendor licenses would be gradual, from the current limit of 853 to 2,000 in January 2007.

A street vendors group that works mostly with Hispanic immigrants, Esperanza del Barrio, warned that despite the increase the legislation would put thousands out of work.

Retail owners and presidents of local business-improvement districts, meanwhile, said the numbers were too large and would be unmanageable.

“It sets up a situation that is unworkable and thus unenforceable,” the executive director of the MetroTech Business Improvement District, Michael Weiss, said, speaking on behalf of the city’s BID managers’ association. “It opens up almost every street in the city, including residential blocks, to a level of vending that is unprecedented. You might conceivably have up to 24 vendors within 20 feet of an intersection, creating issues of pedestrian safety and fierce competition with existing merchants and existing vendors.”

Another controversial proposal would scrap a regulation that vendors need to present working papers showing legal immigration status. Of the 51 professions certified by the Department of Consumer Affairs, vending is the only one whose practitioners are required to present such certification.

Some undocumented immigrants said working as a street vendor is their only option for gainful employment. A Mexican immigrant who is undocumented, Leonardo Cruz Gonzales, said he lost his job at an electrical factory after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Last summer the police took away his taco-and-fruit stand at the Bronx. Even if there were a food permit available, as an illegal immigrant he would not be able to receive one. “We want to sell to survive,” he said.

The proposed changes come 12 years after the city announced its intention to formulate a comprehensive vendor policy, following complaints of Fifth Avenue merchants and smaller outer-borough businesses that street vendors were destructive to their businesses.

The current president of that BID, Thomas Cusick, however, was not pleased with the changes. “This is the most lopsided proposal I have ever seen,” he said. “It is vendor-friendly to the point of being retail-tenant hostile. It will, if adapted, be a massive stimulus to the underground economy, at the expense of the transparent economic engine that generates billions of tax dollars.”

The general counsel to the mayor’s office of city legislative affairs, Kevin Fullington, said the administration has not yet taken a position on the proposal.