This week in Albany, Senator Schumer wryly suggested that Governor Spitzer last year saw himself as Zeus ruling among the clouds of Mount Olympus.

Judging by the Spitzer administration’s record, however, the governor has been more inclined to form a task force than to hurl a thunderbolt.
Belying his reputation as an autocratic and impatient leader, Mr. Spitzer has been increasingly governing by commission.

Rather than ordering his administration to draft policy ideas and deliver them to lawmakers for approval, the governor has delegated crucial components of his agenda to an expanding number of bipartisan commissions and task forces, which have been given months to complete their work and make recommendations.

The administration has spawned so many commissions and task forces that its press officials yesterday afternoon could not say how many had been activated since Mr. Spitzer took office.

In his State of the State address this week, Mr. Spitzer announced the birth of one more, a property tax commission headed by the Nassau County executive, Thomas Suozzi. The governor instructed him to devise a “fair and effective” cap on school property taxes, which have continued to skyrocket in the suburbs despite heavy subsidies from Albany.

In political circles, commissions, whether convened by legislative leaders or the governor, are generally viewed with cynicism. Their official purpose is to grant a range of politicians, civic leaders, and interest groups a chance to study a complex issue and report back to Albany with recommendations.

Historically, they have also been used as a handy tool for leaders to punt on divisive issues, provide a buffer between them and their contentious policies, or allow them to sheath prefabricated decisions with a veneer of consensus.

Senate Republicans, who have floated a variety of property tax cap proposals in recent years, pounced on the Suozzi commission, charging that the governor is only pretending to tackle the problem.

“You didn’t need a commission to understand the depth of the property tax issue in New York,” a Republican senator of Brooklyn, Martin Golden, said. “A cap is a no-brainer, and it could have easily been part of his State of the State speech. Anytime you put together a commission it takes away the responsibility of the governor. This is punting.”

Mr. Spitzer has formed at least five other major commissions and task forces.

He, along with state and city lawmakers, established a 17-member panel to examine ways to reduce traffic, including a congestion-pricing program supported by Mayor Bloomberg.

A “Local Government Efficiency and Competitiveness” commission has been instructed to come up with a plan to pare down New York’s endless layers of taxing jurisdictions.

Mr. Spitzer also set up a commission to streamline financial service regulations and statutes that the governor said were outdated and hurting businesses. It is headed by his insurance superintendent, Eric Dinallo, and packed with major figures of the insurance, banking, and securities industries.

Mr. Dinallo is also running another task force dealing with medical malpractice costs. The New York Sun reported last month that the panel is considering as one solution imposing a $50,000 fee on every doctor in the state.

Mr. Spitzer convened a Commission on Higher Education, which in its interim report proposed creating a multibillion-dollar public university endowment and the hiring of 2,000 new full-time faculty members at SUNY and CUNY. Mr. Spitzer endorsed the recommendations in his speech, but not the commission’s plan to allow public universities to raise tuition without legislative approval.

Mr. Spitzer’s predecessor, Governor Pataki, was another proponent of commissions and task forces, most of which have long ago faded into obscurity. Few recall his “quality communities interagency task force,” which was intended to revitalize urban upstate regions, or his task force on school violence.

The most significant of his administration, the Commission on Health Care Facilities in the 21st Century, which sparked an uproar when it recommended the closing of nine hospitals in New York City, completed its work a month before Mr. Pataki left office, leaving the Spitzer administration to implement its recommendations.

The president and chief executive of the business-backed Partnership for New York City, Kathryn Wylde, who is serving on the traffic and financial services commissions, praised Mr. Spitzer’s less-direct method of governing.

“To engage a broader cross-section of New Yorkers in the work of Albany can only be a good thing,” she said. “Historically, commissions have been used to delay decisions, but in this case, Spitzer is trying to use them improve outcomes.”

The dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the SUNY College at New Paltz, Gerald Benjamin, a member of the local government commission, said his initial qualms that the panel would merely rubber-stamp “the status quo” — which, he said, was the outcome of previous panels studying the same issues — have disappeared.

“The way he constructed it was indicative of a desire for real change,” Mr. Benjamin said. “I was convinced they are serious.”