The City Council’s mass mailings last month, which prominently featured campaign-style photos of Speaker Gifford Miller, cost $1.6 million, according to figures released to The New York Sun yesterday. A spokesman for the speaker’s office told the Sun last month that the mailings’ estimated cost was $37,000.

In June, the Miller spokesman, Stephen Sigmund, said the mailings were sent to more than 100,000 residents, but new numbers obtained by the Sun yesterday through a Freedom of Information Act request show that more than 5.8 million fliers and glossy brochures went out to households in 46 of the city’s 51 council districts.

The mailings were paid for from the council’s administrative budget and were sent out in the two weeks before a mailing blackout period started. That period goes into effect 90 days before any city election and bars candidates from sending mailings from a government office. Mr. Miller is running for the Democratic nomination for mayor.

The council sent out five varieties of mailings: four small fliers on the city budget, outlining efforts to fight Mayor Bloomberg’s budget cuts for services from tree-pruning to libraries, and one glossy color brochure about Mr. Miller’s proposal to decrease class size in the city’s public schools. The fliers were zoned for different council districts and featured pictures of Mr. Miller with the local council representative.

The only five council members whose constituents did not receive any of the mailings were the council’s three Republicans, and two Democrats who have been at odds with the speaker, Madeline Provenzano of the Bronx and Allan Jennings of Queens.

In a written statement yesterday, Mr. Sigmund said: “Regrettably, the information previously released on the budget mailing with members of the council was partial and incomplete. When we realized this, we moved to gather the full and complete information, and we are releasing it.

“But the bottom line,” he said, “remains that these mailings were appropriate to allow council members and the speaker to communicate our budget priorities.”

Pre-budget mailings outlining the services the council wants financed are a time-honored tradition and have been used by past speakers, whether or not they were running for higher office. Some council members told the Sun, however, that this year’s batch looked more like campaign literature than government literature.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this was a political piece meant to knock Mayor Bloomberg and help the speaker in a Democratic primary,” Council Member Simcha Felder, Democrat of Brooklyn, said during a phone interview yesterday.

Mr. Felder, who frequently sides with Mr. Bloomberg on policy issues, said he never authorized joint mailings with the speaker in his district – although the breakdown provided by Mr. Sigmund showed that three mailings did go out in the Brooklyn neighborhoods he represents. More than 78,000 pieces were sent to his constituents at a total cost of approximately $34,000, the breakdown showed.

“I wonder what $1.6 million could do to help our public schools,” Mr. Felder said. “I wonder how many more police officers it would put on the streets instead of wasting taxpayer money.”

Council Member Eva Moskowitz, a Democrat who represents a district neighboring Mr. Miller’s on the East Side and who is running for election as Manhattan borough president, said last night that she declined to participate in at least one of the council mailings. According to the breakdown provided by the council, approximately 242,000 pieces, including copies of the one Ms. Moskowitz opted out of, were mailed in her district, at a cost of approximately $60,000.

“I declined to participate in the mailing because it didn’t seem to me appropriate,” Ms. Moskowitz said.

“I just think one has to be very, very careful. I have an election,” she said. “I didn’t want anyone to accuse me of crossing the line.”

Council officials have said the speaker is entitled by law to send out mailings outside his district.

A campaign adviser to Mr. Bloomberg, William Cunningham, said the miscalculation was a sign that Mr. Miller was not fit to take over city operations.

“This is a man who wants to be in control of the city’s budget, and his office either lied or spent 45 times more money than they thought they did,” Mr. Cunningham said.

“The question I have is, Are you capable of adding or are you capable of telling the truth?” Mr. Cunningham said. “They are obviously not capable of doing one of those things.”

Though the council previously said the mailings were divided into 30 separate jobs, the $1.6 million project was actually broken into 150 printing jobs, with each job costing less than $5,000, the breakdown showed. Printing jobs valued at more than $5,000 must be awarded to bidders solicited through a formal request-for-proposals process. Mr. Sigmund has said the division was not an attempt to avoid an RFP, saying the fliers were “individual mailers.” He also said it has long been customary for the council to award jobs in that fashion.

Mr. Cunningham said: “It sounds like they broke up the price of this so that they could be able to pick the printers or not be hamstrung by having to go with low bidders.”

Yet even some of Mr. Miller’s Republican colleagues defended him yesterday, saying it’s not fair to single him out for a practice common among elected officials.

Staten Island’s James Oddo, the GOP minority leader, said the amount of money spent on the mailings seemed high, but the debate should center on franking privileges, not on the speaker.

“I’m comfortable with looking at franking privileges and how they are used by elected officials,” Mr. Oddo said, “but picking on one candidate in an election year is a little bit disingenuous.”

The president of the nonprofit Citizens Union, Dick Dadey, has said the same in the past and pointed out that the council recently passed legislation to lengthen the blackout period to 90 days from 30.

Last month, the president of Manhattan, C. Virginia Fields, another of the four Democrats running for mayor, called on the city’s Campaign Finance Board and the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board to investigate the council mailings to determine whether her rival, Mr. Miller, had violated any regulations.

Ms. Fields, who is now embroiled in her own flier scandal that involves a doctored photo in mailings sent out by her campaign, did not jump in yesterday.

A spokeswoman for her campaign, Kirsten Powers, said the Fields camp was “waiting for the Conflicts of Interest Board to complete its investigation and issue a ruling.” The Campaign Finance Board ruled that it did not have jurisdiction to investigate the mailings.

The documents provided by the council yesterday included a letter to Mr. Miller from the body’s acting general counsel, Jay Damashek, that said Ms. Fields’s complaint “misapplies” the relevant section of the City Charter. Mr. Damashek said that the mailings were within the law and the Fields claims “have no merit and should be dismissed.”

According to Mr. Miller’s office, the mailings last month represent “just 3%” of the council’s administrative budget.

Mr. Miller was not available for comment last night. Mr. Sigmund said the speaker would not be sending out a post-budget mailing from his council office. Campaign finance rules allow one mailing after the budget is passed if a blackout period is in effect.