Smart public relations operatives try to save their most embarrassing or awkward announcements for Friday afternoons, when the press and the public are paying the least attention.

By the same logic, members of the New York State Legislature save their most embarrassing or awkward votes for the weeks right after an election. Citizens will be distracted by the end-of-year holidays and, if they do pay attention, will have two full years to forget any outrages before they next cast ballots.

So New Yorkers should not be surprised if Albany lawmakers, who were all but paralyzed by gridlock this year, suddenly get very busy in the next two months.

Lawmakers could take advantage of their perceived wiggle room to resolve issues that were too dicey to negotiate during the campaign season, such as balancing the state budget or reforming the Rockefeller-era drug laws.

But they might also use their lame-duck session to spring a surprise or two – including, possibly, hiking their own pay.

You read that right. Some members of the Legislature – who haven’t passed an on-time budget since 1984, and whose collective reputation gets worse with every passing year – think they deserve a raise.

No one is making this argument publicly, of course. But insiders say some lawmakers from Long Island and New York City, where the cost of living is highest, are agitating behind the scenes for their first salary increase since January 1999.

It’s by no means clear that they will succeed, since many of their colleagues recognize that such a move would go over like a lead balloon with the public.

If they don’t act now, however, they give up any hope of adjusting their paychecks until 2007.The Constitution forbids state lawmakers from changing the compensation of any elected official, either upward or downward, during their term of office. For all 212 members of the Legislature, their next two-year term begins on January 1.

To be fair, the Legislature’s present salaries, which range from $79,500 for junior lawmakers to $121,000 for the top leaders, have been flat for almost six years. Inflation has eroded about 10% of their purchasing power in that time. Legislators make much more than average New Yorkers, but much less than successful people in the private sector, such as attorneys, doctors, business executives, and Wall Street traders.

It’s not just members of the Assembly and Senate whose paychecks are stagnating. The salaries of the governor and other statewide elected officials, along with the top administrators of state agencies and hundreds of judges, are all fixed by statute. By tradition, none of these officials gets a raise unless everyone gets a raise.

On the other hand, this would seem a particularly unfortunate time for denizens of the state Capitol to be patting themselves on the back. They already receive some of the highest salaries of any state lawmakers in the country, and they haven’t exactly been covering themselves with glory lately.

They didn’t get around to passing a state budget until August 11,more than four months into the fiscal year, which set a new record and extended New York’s late streak for a 20th year. They also missed a court deadline to overhaul funding for public education, effectively delegating a multibillion-dollar decision to a state Supreme Court justice from Manhattan.

This summer, in the thick of the inaction, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University published a comparative study that found New York’s Legislature to be the most dysfunctional in the nation.

In this year’s legislative elections, challengers have made fixing Albany a central theme of their campaigns. Many incumbents, feeling the heat, have also committed themselves to changing they way they do business at the Capitol. It would take a certain amount of chutzpah to vote for a pay raise so soon after winning office on a reform platform.

Then again, they’ve done it before.

The framers of the state constitution, by forbidding pay increases during a term of office, probably intended that restriction as a way of holding legislators accountable: Lawmakers who voted to give themselves an unreasonable raise would risk losing office before it took effect.

As a practical matter, the rule guarantees just the opposite: The only time the Legislature ever considers the issue of compensation is immediately after the election, when they are least accountable to voters.

The last time this issue came up was the lame duck session of 1998.At that point, the salaries of elected officials, commissioners, and judges had gone unchanged for 12 years, and lawmakers approved across-the-board raises of 38%.

The one obstacle in their path was Governor Pataki, who refused to go along unless they also passed other measures he wanted in trade. The most significant was a bill authorizing the creation of charter schools, which are privately run, publicly funded academies set up as alternatives to public schools.

This time, Mr. Pataki isn’t in such a strong position to bargain. He could threaten to veto a pay raise bill, but the Legislature overrode 120 of his vetoes during their budget battle of last year.

The one force that would easily head off a pay raise is the electorate. If they vote out incumbent lawmakers on Tuesday – particularly majority Democrats in the Assembly and majority Republicans in the Senate – that will send a chastening message to those seeking higher salaries. If, however, the legislative majorities emerge unscathed from this election, lawmakers would quite naturally take that as a glowing review of their job performance – and act accordingly.