ALBANY — Amendments may be in store for a proposal to make New York City-style rent regulations available to upstate communities.

As the Assembly examines an expansion of the Emergency Tenant Protection Act (ETPA), which regulates rents in buildings larger than six units that were constructed before 1974, upstate members say the downstate law is not workable for the rest of the state.

Currently, the opt-in program is only available to New York City and three suburban counties: Westchester, Suffolk and Rockland.

Specifically, a requirement that county officials appoint a regulatory board could create conflicts for upstate communities that are not always politically aligned with county leadership, according to Assemblywoman Pat Fahy, D-Albany.

"I want to make sure we are not applying a downstate solution on upstate," she said.

Rochester Assemblyman Harry Bronson, one of few upstate Democrats backing ETPA, said he is pushing to amend the legislation so that municipalities can self-regulate.

"If it's a town that opts in, they ought to have the right to pick their own board," Bronson said. "Because this is really about local control. ... It's not a dictate or mandate."

In the largely Democratic city of Rochester, the current statute would require oversight from a board appointed by the Republican leadership of Monroe County.

With downstate rent regulations expiring in June, the Assembly leadership has backed an ETPA expansion, along with eight other tenant-friendly bills impacting regulated units in New York City. But rank-and-file members have yet to coalesce behind the package, which was the focus of a lengthy internal discussion Tuesday evening among Assembly Democrats.

"The opposition is many and varied," an Assembly Democrat said.

Many members representing districts north of the Hudson Valley have expressed concern that imposing any rent guidelines will chill development.

At an Assembly hearing on rent regulations and tenants rights in Albany last week, advocates described an abundance of evictions in the Capital Region. Under ETPA, tenants in regulated units would be guaranteed lease renewals and protected from retaliatory evictions.

Assemblyman John McDonald, D-Cohoes, said his district needs more investment and better code enforcement, not rent regulations.

"When I listened to that hearing, it may have been about bad landlords and bad tenants, but it was really about bad living conditions," McDonald said, citing thousands of blighted and boarded up houses in the region.

The Senate has scheduled four hearings on the topic this month.

Sen. Neil Breslin, D-Bethlehem, who sponsored the ETPA expansion in the Senate, said in a radio interview Wednesday that there is much misinformation about the program.

"It scares people at first blush, but in order to be part of it, you must opt-in," Breslin said. "There has to be a lot of public debate ... for everyone to become aware of what it is."

He noted that the legislation's reach is limited in places like the Capital Region, where few buildings would meet the stringent qualifications.

"I view Saratoga Springs as an example," Breslin said. "(Built before) 1974, six units; I don't think there's anything to worry about in Saratoga Springs."

The statute offers some flexibility for municipalities to narrow the scope of the program. Of 18 communities in Westchester that have adopted ETPA, some have elected to apply the program to buildings larger than 10 or 20 units, and in one case, larger than 50 units.

A heated ongoing battle between landlords and tenants in the village of Ossining, Westchester County — one of few communities to approve ETPA since the 1970s — has some lawmakers wary of turning housing policy into a political issue.

After one member of Ossining's five-person village board was replaced by an ETPA critic, the village leadership voted to repeal and replace the program with a more limited version, angering tenants and activists.

Westchester Assemblyman Tom Abinanti, citing the fallout in Ossining, said he thinks the original statute can be improved.

"I believe that once you opt in, a community may not opt out again before they tried it," Abinanti said. "It's unfair to people to have one vote switching in an election, and it changes the entire course."