Signs were held up this week at the state Senate hearing on Gov. Eliot Spitzer's choice to run the Department of Environmental Conservation saying "Free Pete Grannis."

They were held up by environmental activists sitting in the front of a 100-person audience waiting for a vote. At the time they seemed unnecessary, especially after the Senate's Environmental Conservation Committee approved Grannis.

Now, I'm not so sure. The nomination remains in limbo and could stay that way well into April, the fourth month of the Spitzer administration.

Alexander "Pete" Grannis is the man Spitzer wants to run the state DEC, an agency that most lawmakers agree is on the top tier of state departments in size and mission: a $1.1 billion annual budget with the responsibility of taking care of New York's natural resources. You know, stuff like air, water, toxic waste, forests and creatures great and small, just to mention a few.

The guy was nominated Jan. 25. Somewhere along the line, however, Grannis became a valuable chip in the high-stakes poker game of state budget negotiations.

Part of that resulted from Grannis' self-preservation instincts: He wouldn't resign his 33-year seat in the state Assembly before the DEC job was his because he didn't want to give up one job without knowing he had the other. Few among us could blame him for that.

But most of Spitzer's appointments, and this was true for the governor's predecessors as well, took over at their respective positions while waiting for confirmation because they didn't have to give up an elected seat to run an agency.

Grannis' position gave Senate Republicans more leverage with Spitzer, the guy who came to Albany in January with more political capital than most governors enjoy - nearly three out of every four voters pulled the lever for him.

Spitzer came in pushing reform and hasn't backed down from that so far, challenging Albany power brokers in ways they haven't been challenged in years.

Environmental activists based in Albany said the nomination was held up purely as a trump card in case it was needed to get Spitzer to bend at an opportune time.

There must be something to that because usually, once a candidate gets through the main committee interrogations, it's pretty much a 24-hour turnaround to full legislative approval - and Grannis hasn't even been scheduled.

One Republican Hudson Valley senator says he voted a conditional "yes" to push Grannis' nomination to the next step because of what he calls legitimate questions about the New York City Democrat's qualifications to run the DEC.

"There have been some serious issues that have been raised by the sportsmen," said Sen. Vincent Leibell, R-Patterson. "And the other issue has been Pete's never having run a large agency."

Leibell said that during the controversy over the state comptroller's position, the governor criticized Democratic Assemblyman Thomas DiNapoli of Long Island for not having run a large agency, yet the DEC is one-third larger than the comptroller's office. DiNapoli is now comptroller.

Leibell acknowledges that he missed a "substantial" part of Grannis' nomination hearing because of other committee meetings that competed for his time.

"I've known Pete for years. It's certainly not personal," Leibell said yesterday. "But the DEC's one of our big, big agencies and one of our very most important."

Leibell said most of the people who have run the agency had backgrounds more suited to running such a big department.

One who comes to mind is John Cahill, who was, among other things, Gov. George Pataki's law partner. I'm pretty sure there aren't 3,398 people working in that law firm, as there are at the DEC.

"At the national and state level, these are political positions," said Robert Moore, executive director of the Albany-based lobbying group Environmental Advocates. "I don't think any of the people who were put in that job before had experience running an agency of this size. And it's a smaller job for Pete Grannis since Governor Pataki cut 800 of those jobs."

Moore said the job of overseeing the state's resources couldn't go to a better steward than Grannis.

"If you look across the responsibilities of a DEC commissioner, Pete Grannis meets every one of those tests," Moore said, noting Grannis' experience with the state Legislature, budgets and environmental issues. "This is politics as usual in Albany. You hold up something in order to get something you want."