With “pay to play” scandals rocking local politics from New Jersey to Los Angeles, New York City is taking innovative and overdue steps to document and regulate the flow of money into campaigns at the start of this election year. But disagreement between the Campaign Finance Board and City Hall threatens to derail reasonable reforms when they are most needed.

First, the good news: this weekend New York City is launching a first-of-its-kind, publicly accessible, Web-based accounting of the flow of campaign contributions from companies that do business with city government. Located at the city’s Web site, NYC.gov, the function allows people to search a database of more than 45,000 vendors who do more than $100,000 worth of business with the city each year, searching campaign contributors by either an individual’s name or company name.

This vehicle for increased transparency is expected to exert a self-policing influence on campaign donations, as reporters, the public and competing candidates will be able to see who may be attempting to secure themselves future business through contributions.

Adding actual teeth to New York City campaign finance law is another matter. To date, we are all carrot and no stick.

In 1998, New York City voters decisively approved a charter reform put forward by Mayor Giuliani to require disclosure of the money donated to local candidates by companies doing business with the city. Six years later, the measure has still not been fully enforced by the Campaign Finance Board, who claim an unusual “can’t do” attitude reinforced by what has in the past appeared to be ideologically driven stonewalling on a staff level.

At the same time, the City Council responded to charter revision by voting itself – over mayoral veto – the most generous matching-funds pack age in the nation. While it is true that we live in one of the country’s most expensive advertising markets, it is also true that the vast majority of our local races are effectively uncontested. Still the money flows in ever increasing amounts. If a lobbyist gives $250 to a candidate, taxpayers match that by handing over $1,000.

Our self-made billionaire mayor’s uniquely self-funded status has diminished his credibility among left-leaning campaign finance advocates. But from a nonpartisan perspective, the mayor’s self-financing of his campaigns saves millions of dollars in taxpayer matching money, and opens the door to the possibility that Mayor Bloomberg cannot be bought and sold like a typical politician. Still, ethical billionaires who want to go into politics are rare enough, even in New York, that it wouldn’t make sense to count on them as the backbone of democracy.

The influence of money on politics is under mining confidence in the integrity of our government. We see spouses of donors unwittingly giving maximum donations, relatives of elected officials padding the employee rolls at the New York City Board of Elections, while congressional leaders’ political action committees employ their own family members to the tune of hundreds of thou sands of dollars.

In a city with a $50 billion annual combined budget, 300,000 employees and 8 million people the temptation toward corruption can be overwhelming. That’s why implementing real campaign finance reform matters.

In an election year, there should be a special sense of urgency, but in a modestly attended hearing at the American Bar Association on 44th Street, administration representatives and members of the campaign finance board quietly clashed about whether to move forward on requiring donation disclosure in the current mayoral race.

The Web-based disclosure system known as Vendex is a City Hall initiative, developed in tensely over the past 12 weeks by the Department of Information, Technology and Telecommunications in response of complaints by the Campaign Finance Board that they could not coordinate their donor database in a comprehensive, accessible, or timely manner. Now the administration is offering the board an additional multimillion dollar shot of funding in order to get its house in order enough to comply with the City Charter six years late.

But to date, the Campaign Finance Board has been unable to even decide on a basic definition of what it means to “do business” with the city and it looks doubtful that they will decide to implement regulations in the current year. In their extreme caution bordering on passivity, the board does seem determined to make the perfect the enemy of the good. There is an urgent need to have both full disclosure and enforcement during the money-dredging season in advance of the September Democratic primary.

The chairman of the Campaign Finance Board Frederick O. Schwarz Jr., who served as the city’s top lawyer in the Koch administration, has described the Bloomberg administration’s launch of Vendex as “a good first step.” It is now incumbent upon the Campaign Finance Board to take the next step toward necessary reform at their April 14th meeting by voting to put forward disclosure requirements for campaign contributors who do business with the city. This is the least they can do. If they fail, they will provide fresh evidence of their impotence as an organization.

Agreement in principle and agreeing to action are very different things. The clock is ticking on the Campaign Finance Board’s opportunity to redeem its reputation – a reasonable timetable for regulation and the comically overdue implementation of the 1998 charter revision should be presented as well at their meeting next week. On the City Hall side, while Vendex is an impressive step forward, it shares many of the Bloomberg administration’s strengths and weaknesses: it is a technological application of good government principles, but definitively un-flashy and consequently unlikely to get the credit it deserves, while meeting resistance from a permanent government bureaucracy that would just as soon have a real Democratic administration in place.