The speaker of the City Council moved around the pieces on his campaign chess board yesterday, laying out plans to thwart the West Side stadium and to increase funding for school construction.

Setting the stage for a possible lawsuit against Mayor Bloomberg in the midst of an election year, the speaker, Gifford Miller, said the council would start the process of rezoning the 13-acre stadium site and would introduce legislation to prevent the mayor from spending so-called PILOT money on his own.

Both are direct assaults on Mr. Bloomberg’s plan to build the stadium for the Jets and possibly the 2012 Olympics, and they are key campaign wedge issues that all the Democratic mayoral candidates have been seeking to capitalize on.

During his final State of the City speech, Mr. Miller, one of four Democrats seeking the party’s nomination to run for mayor in November’s election, ratcheted up his attacks and rolled out a campaign theme pinned to a “right choices” slogan.

“The bottom line is that I will keep fighting against this stadium so that my children and your children don’t end up paying for this terrible mistake,” Mr. Miller said. His position has evolved since November, when he said he was not against the idea of a stadium but opposed mostly the lack of an open bidding process on the site.

The 35-year-old Upper East Sider also vowed to block Mr. Bloomberg’s capital budget unless it puts back $1.3 billion more in spending on schools projects. The mayor included that money in an original proposal but was counting on the state money, which did materialize. The mayor, who regularly touts the changes he’s made to the floundering public school system, said the exclusion is a “delay,” not a cut.

After Mr. Miller’s half-hour speech, while guests were milling around a reception area in another section of the building eating roast-beef sandwiches and bagels, Mr. Miller’s spokesman, Stephen Sigmund, expanded on the highlights.

The new legislation, he said, would require the mayor to go through the general budget to spend the special “payments in lieu of taxes” it gets from businesses around the city. The mayor plans to divert that money from the budget to finance the city’s $300 mil lion contribution to the New York Sports and Convention Center, the centerpiece of the city’s Olympics bid.

Mr. Bloomberg – who is generally popular but is increasingly taking heat for his dogged support of the stadium – and his allies have said the 75,000-seat domed stadium, which will double as an expansion of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, will produce jobs and great economic growth.

A spokesman for the mayor, Jordan Barowitz, issued a statement a few hours after the speaker’s speech saying Mr. Miller was “abdicating his responsibility to lead the council in favor of his mayoral ambitions.”

“Elections often bring out the worst in politicians, this one looks no different,” Mr. Barowitz said.

When asked about the speaker’s proposed PILOT legislation, Mr. Barowitz said that under the City Charter, the mayor has the authority to spend that money without going through the general budget. Mr. Miller’s office, however, pointed to another section of the charter in support of the speaker’s position.

Within hours of the speech, several other groups and stakeholders chimed in with reactions, including another Democratic candidate for mayor, Rep. Anthony Weiner.

A Brooklyn and Queens representative, Mr. Weiner, the only Democrat to attack Mr. Miller publicly, characterized the speaker as wishy-washy on the rezoning issue. The 13-acre site, Mr. Weiner said, should have been included in a larger rezoning agreement brokered a few weeks ago for Manhattan’s far West Side.

The Jets organization, which has launched an aggressive campaign to keep its project on track, also reacted. Officials with the football team distributed by e-mail a letter signed by 11 council members and sent to the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The letter opposes the speaker’s proposed zoning changes – which would give other interested developers the same zoning assurances the Jets have – and encourages the state-run MTA to reject his changes.

“We are sending a message to the MTA: Please don’t accept any bids that involve further rezoning because we are not going to do it,” a stadium proponent, Council Member Tony Avella, said. Mr. Avella, Democrat of Bayside, is chairman of the council’s zoning and franchise committee.

The borough president of the Bronx, Adolfo Carrion Jr., said Mr. Miller was clearly setting himself up for the campaign. His proposals were broad, but the key would be in the follow-up, he said.

“The devil is always in the details, as we know,” Mr. Carrion said. “We’ll see how he presents the details.”

And the city’s largest municipal union, District Council 37, said it “appreciated” the speaker’s speech but wants to see other issues, such as Medicaid cuts, addressed.