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Members of the City Council thought they were going to have a debate Friday on whether to allow more legal vendors on city streets. But members of the Bloomberg administration showed up with a different agenda – they want greater powers to crack down on illegal vendors.

One of the administration's recommendations: Fingerprint those who violate the city's vending laws.

"By fingerprinting these offenders, we gain the ability to track recidivists and identify those high-frequency repeat offenders who pose the biggest challenge to the criminal justice system," said Shari Hyman, Deputy Criminal Justice Coordinator.

Fingerprinting vendors, however, would require a change in state law.

And the proposal angered Brooklyn councilman Charles Barron, who is introducing a bill to increase the number of street vending licenses from 4,000 to 25,000.

"This is your contribution to the discussion?" Barron asked. "It's an insult. I feel very insulted that you would come here with a page and a half that's talking about fingerprinting."

Consumer Affairs Committee chairman Leroy Comrie, who's introduced a bill dealing with how vendors display their licenses, took the city to task on another front – it's lack of knowledge about how many vendors are actually on the streets.

"One of the things we don't have here is a city count, and I think that would make it easier to deal with either bill," Comrie said. "If we can do a homeless survey with volunteers, we can do a vendor survey and I would suspect we could do the vending survey a lot quicker because it's done during the daytime."

In all, there are eight different bills on the table concerning street vendors. The only consensus is that something needs to be done.