The speaker of the City Council introduced legislation yesterday aimed at blocking Mayor Bloomberg from controlling tax-break money the Jets would provide if they win the right to build the West Side stadium.

Mr. Bloomberg wants to finance the city’s $300 million contribution to the New York Sports and Convention Center with “payments in lieu of taxes.” The money would go to build a platform over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s rail yards at the site.

The council speaker, Gifford Miller, a candidate for the Democratic mayoral nomination, objects to the mayor’s assertion that he has sole discretion over the money and would earmark it to service debt related to the stadium project. Generally, revenue from those sorts of payments is put into the city’s general operating fund.

“No mayor should be able to divert $300 million from a personal slush fund for his own political agenda,” Mr. Miller told The New York Sun. “Bloomberg’s sole interest is making sure his pet project gets passed, no matter what the cost.”

Mr. Miller is seeking to ensure that the council gets an opportunity to track the money that comes to the city from those payments and has a say in how it is spent.

And while Mr. Miller’s focus is on the West Side project, which he is trying to use to his political advantage as he positions himself to unseat Mr. Bloomberg in November, it is clear that the stadium is only the latest example of decades of problems the city has faced by extending these targeted tax breaks.

Payments in lieu of taxes, or Pilots, are agreements entered into by the city with both public and private property-holders. In these arrangements, the city exempts the property holders from paying taxes on real property and agrees to accept instead a prescribed amount, which is generally less than the property taxes.

The payments are made through a formal contractual agreement that in the past would be approved by the Board of Estimate, which is now defunct.

A report by the city comptroller that looked at the way similar tax breaks – for everyone from Con Edison to Citibank New York – have been accounted for over the past two decades shows that the city has traditionally had trouble tracking the payments.

In 1990 the comptroller’s office began an extensive review of the program, and while the comptroller’s experts calculated the payments for 30 agreements made with the city, there were seven agreements that they said mystified them.

The comptroller has not revisited the program audit for more than a decade and the incumbent, William Thompson Jr., announced last week that, given the current dust-up over the Jets stadium, his staff would audit the payments in lieu of taxes sponsored by the Economic Development Corp. and the Industrial Development Agency, to see if the problem has persisted.

The findings are expected this summer.

“It is not all that easy to say whether Pilots are intrinsically good or bad,” the spokesman for the Independent Budget Office, Doug Turetsky, told the Sun. “The real issue that the council is looking at is that what the mayor is trying to do is a departure from the typical practice of putting that money into the general operating fund of the city, instead of going to something the mayor has decided is important.”

Mr. Miller’s legislation is premised on the idea that it is illegal under the City Charter to redirect payments outside the budget. The office of the corporation counsel, the city’s lawyer, said it is a question of whether state law trumps city statutes.

State law has two parts that cover the city’s Industrial Development Agency, one of the sponsoring groups that would extend the tax break. The language in the general statutes concerning such agencies and the language in the separate regulations for large cities differ over how the payments are turned over.

The mayor’s lawyers have been looking to the broader city regulations as the governing legal authority, and in their view those rules permit him to exercise discretion over the money.

The city takes in about $200 million a year in payments in lieu of taxes. The biggest source of those payments is the Battery Park City Authority, which runs a residential and commercial complex in Lower Manhattan. Battery Park City was created on land excavated from dirt that had been removed to make room for the World Trade Center.

A luxury housing development on the state-owned West Side site would yield about $423 million in payments in lieu of taxes for the city over 30 years, according to the Regional Plan Association, a group that opposes the Jets stadium.

By way of comparison, the property tax break the state Legislature gave Madison Square Garden in 1982 has cost the city about $237 million, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Independent Budget Office.