The 30-20 vote, they said, was actually a squeaker, sending a message of division to the state Legislature, which must now pass the plan by April 7. To hear them tell it, the days leading up to the vote were filled with arm-twisting and backroom deals.

Last Friday, Brooklyn Council member Lewis Fidler believed the plan couldn’t pass — he counted 29 votes against it.

Horse-trading is expected, he said.

“The ‘we’ll do a project in your district,’ that’s politics,” Fidler said. “But without these deals, there were not 26 votes in favor of this plan. Albany understands that, too.”

Fidler claimed Bloom­berg had offered to hold a fund-raiser for one Council member in exchange for switching sides.

“If other people did that, the U.S. attorney would be called,” he said. “I’m not suggesting it’s criminal, but it’s hypocrisy that can’t be waved off with a Bloomberg-esque wave of the hand.”

. . .

“This isn’t going away,” insisted Queens Council member Tony Avella, another opponent of congestion pricing. “The use of taxpayer dollars to lobby Council members is clearly inappropriate.”

Turnpike Authority spokesman Joe Orlando says trucks “as far as the eye can see” are driving about 20 mph and heading south near Exit 14 in Newark.

He says truckers are also chanting and protesting at the Vince Lombardi Service Area in Bergen County.

Orlando says the protest is backing up Turnpike traffic.

At a news conference after the vote, where Mr. Bloomberg made a rare appearance on the speaker’s side of City Hall, officials sought to play down the narrowness of their hard-won victory, among the closest of this administration in a body that typically votes in near unanimity.

Approving the proposal, Ms. Quinn said, would send a message to the Legislature that the “people who were elected to represent the New Yorkers who live in our five boroughs are sick and tired of our streets being clogged with traffic, we’re sick and tired of the children who live in our city literally having to fight to be able to breathe, and that we see congestion pricing as a solution to this problem.”

But the ultimate fate of the proposal now resides in Albany, where the intentions of lawmakers whose approval is needed remained unclear. Gov. David A. Paterson and the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, have expressed their support. But Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who has derailed Mr. Bloomberg’s ambitions in the past, remained noncommittal, telling members of the Democratic conference on Sunday night that he would not take the issue up until the state budget was completed.

If the Assembly waits to act until after the budget, it could threaten the bill’s chances in the Senate, because it would come before the Legislature as a stand-alone item, making approval more elusive. Several council members complained as they voted that the mayor had reneged on a promise that they would not be asked to take up the measure until the State Legislature had agreed to support the proposal.

But other council members took the vote as a sign that Mr. Silver would ultimately back the plan, since Ms. Quinn had said privately that she would not call for a vote until she had an indication that it would gain approval from the state.

But Mr. Silver said that he had made no such assurance.

But that hasn’t stopped plenty of people from calling the Forest Avenue bar in hopes the NCAA basketball pool had somehow been resumed — and at least one other bar is trying to fill the void.

“We still have people coming in looking for it,” Mary Haggerty, wife of Jody’s owner Jody Haggerty, said by telephone from her home yesterday. “I’m sure we would love to see it [come back]. People have been asking for it to come back and they’re hoping, but it’s not going to be this year.”

Meanwhile, most bettors interviewed by the Advance yesterday agreed that the place to bet on the games is Dannyboy’s Tavern, an establishment located about 2 1/2 miles from Jody’s, on Victory Boulevard in Castleton Corners.

“The problem with Jody’s is, no one was paying taxes on it except the last guy who won. It just got too big, and it was blatant that it was getting so huge,” said one patron, picking up a Dannyboy’s betting pool form at Jimmy Max in Westerleigh yesterday. “Let me put it this way: Danny’s is legit, and I haven’t heard of anywhere else.”

The first round of NCAA tournament games begins tomorrow, but most pools focus on naming the Final Four, the ultimate champ and — the tiebreaker — the final game point total.

Dannyboy’s was keeping unusually tight-lipped about what is a legitimate and perfectly legal enterprise, but some estimates put the size of last year’s pool at $200,000. By comparison, Jody’s topped out at a $1.5 million payout at the end of its 29-year-run and was featured in national publications and network news shows.

. . .

Wading into a local debate fueled by animal rights activists about whether horse-drawn carriages should be allowed to operate in the city, the company will allow its customers to support a ban on the carriages by offering to donate $25 to the Coalition to Ban Horse Drawn Carriages for every storage space rented.

The horse-drawn carriage industry is arguing that the advertising and fund-raising campaign is part of a plan to outlaw the carriages that ferry tourists through Central Park and on Midtown streets so the storage company can buy the land currently occupied by two carriage stables. The stables are situated near real estate owned by Edison Properties, the company that controls Manhattan Mini Storage.