More than 40% of the money that the City Council speaker, Gifford Miller, has spent on his bid to become mayor will not count against the Campaign Finance Board spending cap, if he has his way.

Mr. Miller has classified $1.2 million of the $2.7 million he has spent to date as exempt from the cap, citing the costs as necessary for circulating nominating petitions and ensuring that his campaign complies with city regulations and laws.

Expenditures in both of those categories are exempt from the $5.7 million cap on spending that candidates agree to abide by, in exchange for participating in the public matching fund program, in which taxpayer money supplements contributions they have raised.

The exemptions declared by the Miller campaign amount to more than those of all three of his opponents combined. Also seeking the mayoral nomination are a former president of the Bronx, Fernando Ferrer; a congressman who represents a Brooklyn-Queens district, Anthony Weiner, and the president of Manhattan, C. Virginia Fields.

On a percentage basis, Mr. Miller’s “exempt” spending was more than five times the level that triggers a requirement for submission of “detailed records.”

Thus, the Miller campaign itemized more than 1,600 expenditures for petitioning and compliance since May 2002. They range from an outlay of $6 for postage on July 2, 2002, to a payment of $27,740 to a consultant, Karen Hicks, a former Howard Dean adviser.

They also include dozens of payments to field staff members, cell phone bills, fees for computer software, spending for printing, and roughly $10,000 in transit expenses.

Earlier this summer, the Fields and Bloomberg campaigns, government watchdogs, and newspaper editorial boards assailed Mr. Miller after the council sent out a series of taxpayer-financed mass mailings – one of them touting a council initiative on smaller class sizes – that cost $1.6 million and were covered with the speaker’s name and picture.

To some, the 43% exemption rate in Miller campaign expenditures raises the question of whether Mr. Miller is pushing the envelope to maximize the amount of money he can spend on the September 13 primary.

The government reform coordinator at the New York Public Interest Research Group, Neil Rosenstein, said that while he had not seen Mr. Miller’s spending reports, the high exemption declaration seemed to warrant scrutiny.

“It raises eyebrows,” Mr. Rosenstein said. “The one thing we’ve been blessed with is an aggressive Campaign Finance Board and audit unit that should look at it and at any other questions.”

“You don’t want candidates having an advantage before the election,” Mr. Rosenstein said.

The president of Citizens’ Union, Dick Dadey criticized Mr. Miller after the council revealed its mailings were valued at $1.6 million, not the $37,000 it had originally released as the cost. His comments yesterday parroted his statements about the mailing.

“It again appears that what he’s doing is legal, but whether it’s right is another question,” Mr. Dadey said. “He definitely comes right up to the line without legally crossing it.”

Mr. Dadey said the presence of Mayor Bloomberg, a billionaire who is expected to spend $100 million of his own money, has put pressure on the candidates to come up with creative ways to augment spending.

The campaign did run a very large petition drive to collect signatures.

Though a candidate needs only 7,500 valid signatures on nominating petitions to qualify for the ballot in the Democratic mayoral primary, gathering more signatures is a favored sport in this city. It is done partly as a shield from signature challenges and partly as a show of strength and grassroots support.

Mr. Miller collected 158,000 signatures compared to the 100,000 Mr. Ferrer submitted, the 60,000 Ms. Fields collected, and the 40,000 Mr. Weiner gathered.

In addition, Mr. Miller launched a second petition drive to create a new ballot line, Smaller Class Sizes. All of the expenses related to the line were classified by the Miller campaign as exempt, allowing Mr. Miller to spend many thousands of dollars more outside the cap.

“The beauty of the petitioning is that it gives you a real activity for supporters and volunteers to engage in,” Mr. Miller’s campaign manager, Brian Hardwick, told the New York Times earlier this month. “Oftentimes in elections, you can’t activate them until later in the process. The petitioning allowed us two months ago to start to build and test our organization. We’ve knocked on more than 150,000 doors of targeted primary voters to get their signatures and introduce them to Gifford.”

Yesterday, a spokesman for the Miller campaign, Stephen Sigmund, said that it “complies fully” with the law and that its exemptions would stand up to the board’s scrutiny.

“No one has done more to strengthen the public financing laws than Gifford Miller, ensuring that he and everyone who participates discloses every dime spent and dollar raised,” Mr. Sigmund wrote in an e-mail. “In fact, that’s how you know this information. Our campaign complies fully with that law, and the CFB is clear that costs associated with ballot access are exempt.”

According to a review of candidate financial disclosures, Mr. Ferrer has declared that $296,732 of the $2.02 million he has spent is exempt from the cap. Mr. Weiner declared $74,442 of what he has shelled out to date exempt, and Ms. Fields did not declare any exemptions. Her campaign for the primary has lagged behind in fund-raising anyway and would not have enough money to spend beyond the cap.

City law establishes 7.5% as the baseline for spending-cap exemptions. The Campaign Finance Board handbook says candidates can either limit their “aggregate exempt expenditures” to 7.5% of all of their spending or maintain “detailed reports” to prove that anything above that qualifies as exempt.

A spokeswoman for the Campaign Finance Board, Tanya Domi, said that documentation for exemptions greater than the 7.5% are scrutinized and that candidates’ disclosures are routinely audited.

Mr. Miller, who cannot seek re-election to the council because of term limits, has raised more money than any of the other Democrats and is the only one who has extra money to spend beyond the CFB spending ceiling.

He recently spent roughly $800,000 for time on network and cable television for a slickly produced commercial, and he is now launching a Spanish-language commercial.

In 2001, one of the mayoral candidates, Alan Hevesi, then the city comptroller, claimed $786,645 in exemptions from the cap – far more than his opponents – and the Campaign Finance Board rejected $296,000 of those claims. In 2002, Mr. Hevesi was elected state comptroller.

An election lawyer, Arthur Greig, said yesterday that compliance and petitioning are expensive.

“Certainly anybody is going to try to find ways within the law to maximize the available funds for their campaign,” he said. “I think it’s entirely legal and appropriate. Your campaign-finance ‘good government’ types probably feel that it’s stretching the intent of the law. I don’t necessarily believe that.”

A professor of political science at Baruch College, David Birdsell, said he would blame the “arcane” regulations on petitioning, not the candidates.

“Virtually none of this process makes sense in New York,” he said. “It invites inscrutability and it invites abuse in some ways. I don’t fault the candidates for that.”

But Mr. Birdsell said petitioning is clearly a mode of campaigning.

“You’re putting people on the streets, you’re talking about the candidates, and you’re giving people the opportunity to actually take that pre-ballot-box physical action of signing a piece of paper in favor of someone’s campaign,” he said. “That’s a powerful public performance.”