A candidate for the Democratic nomination for mayor, Gifford Miller, announced a plan yesterday to overhaul the city’s emergency response system and create a city Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Miller, who is the speaker of the City Council, also received the endorsement of a director of emergency management in the Giuliani administration, Jerome Hauer.

Currently, Mr. Miller said, the city lacks “a clear line of accountability” on security. The new head of the proposed department would not be able to “second-guess the actions” of the fire and police departments, Mr. Miller said, but would coordinate anti-terrorism efforts with emergency preparedness.

Mr. Miller’s proposal comes a month after the Bloomberg administration’s Citywide Incident Management System came under unusual public criticism from a top official of the Fire Department, Chief Peter Hayden. He said at a council hearing that the mayor, in the plan approved in April, unwisely assigned police officials authority over terrorist attacks involving hazardous materials, though fire officials had more expertise.

In yesterday’s remarks, delivered at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Mr. Miller also criticized the allocation of anti-terror resources by the federal government as a “red-state gravy train.”

“Dick Cheney’s home state of Wyoming gets seven times more in domestic funding per capita than New York does,” Mr. Miller said. “Mike Bloomberg may feel comfortable just trusting George W. Bush to look out for New York City, but I don’t.”

The speaker also outlined a $100 million plan to boost hospitals’ ability to respond to an emergency or terrorist attack. Some of the money would be spent to increase the number of hospital beds available for burn victims, as only 66 “burn beds” are currently available at hospitals in the five boroughs, according to Mr. Miller. He also cited a need for additional decontamination units and anthrax vaccine. The lack of vaccine is particularly troubling to Mr. Miller, who said: “I’m sure if you ask the Bloomberg administration about this, they’ll tell you that the federal government has it covered. But if the federal government couldn’t even provide us with enough vaccine for the flu, then I don’t know how any responsible mayor could trust the Bush administration when it comes to something like anthrax.”

A third element of Mr. Miller’s plan calls for the hiring of 1,000 additional police officers. They would be assigned to “quality of life” beats, which would free up more experienced officers to what are considered high-risk areas, including subways, bridges, ports, ferries, and heliports.

A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg’s re-election campaign, William Cunningham, parried Mr. Miller’s assertions.

“Gifford Miller has been the City Council speaker for a long time. If he really believes what he said, that New York is this unprepared, what has he been doing for the last three-and-a-half years?” Mr. Cunningham asked.

The Bloomberg spokesman denounced the speaker’s remarks about the mayor as “a political cheap shot from a political-cheap-shot artist” and defended Mr. Bloomberg’s antiterrorism record, citing the 1,000 police officers assigned to counterterrorist operations.