ALBANY-Under the angry eyes of 150 tenants up for a "mini-lobby day," the State Senate on April 7 rejected a move to extend the state's tenant pro-tections for four years.

The 33-27 vote blocked a procedural maneuver by Minority Leader Martin Connor to get the Republican-controlled Senate to vote on renewing the rent laws unchanged. The Assembly passed a bill strengthening tenant protections last month, and tenant organizers saw Connor's discharge petition as a ploy to force Senate Republicans from the New York City area to show which side they're on. Given the choice between tenants and Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, all but two--Roy Goodman of Manhattan and Frank Padavan of Queens--picked Bruno.

Senate Democrats offered the usual litany of arguments in support of rent controls: that rent-regulated tenants are predominantly working-class and poor, that people are already tripled up in $1,100 a month one-bedroom apartments, that vacancy decontrol was a disaster when Governor Nelson Rockefeller pushed it through in 1971. "We're not dealing with Barbra Streisand in Cambria Heights," said Alton Waldon of Queens. "This is the haves versus the have-nots."

"This will not be a debate on the merits of rent control," he declared, and the Senate Republicans ovinely obeyed. Even Goodman and Padavan didn't say a word about the bill on the floor.

"They only voted for it because Bruno allowed them to," said Jenny Laurie of the Metropolitan Council on Housing.

Tenants lobbying other metropolitan- area Republican Senators didn't meet much success. Goodman emphasized his support for rent controls, but told ten-ants that he would not try to get other Republicans to break with Bruno. Nicholas Spano of Westchester told a group of about 25 constituents that he was "firmly in favor" of renewing the rent laws, but wouldn't vote for the discharge petition because it was "designed to embarrass the majority."

Other area Republicans voting against the bill were Dean ($4,700) Skelos and Michael ($4,550) Tully of Nassau County, John ($2,100) Marchi of Staten Island, and Serphin ($9,150) Maltese of Queens. Brooklyn Democrat John Sampson, a former landlord lawyer, wavered, first attempting to leave the chamber and then asking to abstain before he was pushed back in line by the party organization.

"If they don't feel your anger, we're going to lose," Michael McKee of the New York State Tenants & Neighbors Coalition told tenants after the vote.

Such a compromise would probably include such devastating loopholes as lowering the "luxury decontrol" threshold--from $2,000 a month to $1,000--or vacancy decontrol (either completely deregulating vacant apartments, as was done here in 1971, or the San Francisco system of allowing landlords to charge new tenants as much as they can get but limiting increases for tenants in place). The 1971 decontrol, which coincided with the era of massive abandonment and gave landlords a powerful incentive to harass tenants out of their homes, was such a disaster that it inspired a Republican-dominated state government to put most apartments under rent stabilization three years later. That hasn't prevented landlord propagandists from claiming that "it doesn't hurt tenants in place."