ALBANY — Malcolm A. Smith, the minority leader of the State Senate, is promising something drastic, by Albany standards, if Democrats win control of the chamber on Tuesday. He wants to share power with rank-and-file lawmakers.

Whether he will follow through remains to be seen. But in an interview, Mr. Smith, a Queens Democrat, who would be the state’s first black majority party leader if his party gains control of the Senate, listed a litany of the sweeping promises politicians make when they stand outside the levers of power.

He said he would reinvent the Senate’s committees, which often have little discernable authority, and make them work more like committees do in Congress. He said he would move to cut the Senate majority’s central staff by at least 15 percent, or roughly 100 workers. He said he would narrow the wide gap between the resources allocated to majority and minority party members for office budgets. And he would move quickly to introduce legislation to publicly finance elections, despite the state’s fiscal crisis.

Senate Republicans express confidence they will hold their one-seat majority in the chamber, and tend to roll their eyes at Mr. Smith for what they see as empty political grandstanding before an election. Mr. Smith has made headlines before for claims that did not materialize, including his boasts last year that he was close to enticing some Senate Republicans to shift to his side of the aisle.

Even good-government groups are wary of bold promises, having been disappointed by the administrations of Gov. Eliot Spitzer and his onetime running mate, Gov. David A. Paterson, whose promises of reform have not translated into much tangible alteration to the way business is done in Albany.

The changes that Mr. Smith describes, if they actually came to pass, could recast the often-inscrutable way business has long been conducted by both political parties. Legislative power resides with the Senate majority leader and the speaker of the Democratic-led Assembly, who alongside the governor form the so-called three men in a room who run the state. Deals among the trio are typically worked out behind closed doors, often with little public debate or influence from the remaining 210 lawmakers.

“It’s time for New York State government to move into the 21st century,” Mr. Smith said. “It would be more transparent, more participatory, from legislators to advocates to Joe Citizen.”

He added that his leadership was “not going to be about exacting revenge” for years of slights at the hands of Senate Republicans, who have controlled the chamber for more than four decades.

Under Mr. Smith’s plan to change the Senate’s rules, committees would have more autonomy to bring bills to the floor, and members of a standing conference committee would seek to negotiate legislation with the Assembly.

The ranking minority member of a committee could also put a bill on a committee’s agenda. And Mr. Smith says he would also abolish a practice put in place by Republicans years ago that allows essentially secret voting on hostile amendments or motions to send stalled bills out of committees.

He would require committee members to attend meetings and would discontinue the practice of holding committee meetings off the Senate floor while the Senate was in session. He would also end limits on the ability of senators in the minority to use what are known as “discharge motions” to force bills to the floor.

“If he delivered, it would be the equivalent of a political earthquake,” said Blair Horner, the legislative director of the New York Public Interest Research Group.

“But as we know from the 2006 election, when Spitzer and Paterson ran to change Albany and then they didn’t do anything, talk is easy; delivering is hard.”

As it stands, minority parties in Albany are relegated to poor stepchildren status.

Take the issue of office budgets. The Senate Republicans spent $445,904, on average, on their office budgets over the six months ending in March, according to a recent report by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a branch of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. By comparison, the Senate Democrats spent $274,316 on their staff budgets, the report showed.

Senate Republicans have accused Mr. Smith of being more concerned with process than with issues that matter to voters, but their main and most potent electoral pitch has focused more on geography than policy. A Democratic-led chamber would doom upstate, they say, because it would leave all of the levers of government in the hands of New York City residents for the first time in decades.

“Every single leader would be from New York City,” Dean G. Skelos, the Senate majority leader, said in an interview in Albany last month.

Voters outside the city, he said, “are concerned about regional balance and fairness, so that’s resonating throughout the state.”

Mr. Skelos, who did not comment for this article, is not from upstate, but from Long Island, though upstate members play a predominating role in his caucus.

“The reality is that what most people care about is what the Legislature will do for them,” said John McArdle, a spokesman for Mr. Skelos, citing issues like a mandatory ceiling on school property taxes, which Mr. Smith has also supported.

As for Mr. Smith’s promised changes in how Albany operates, Mr. McArdle said, “These are process issues that the vast majority of New Yorkers are not focused on.”

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