June 4, 1983

New York City's $16.7 billion budget for the next fiscal year was adopted yesterday after three days and two nights of negotiations that produced more money for public schools, police officers, street cleaners, parks and libraries. The approvals by the City Council and the Board of Estimate included an increase in the property-tax rate that will average about 9 cents, bringing the average rate to $9.21 for each $100 of assessed value. Charges for water and sewer use are also to go up, by an average of $9 annually, in the fiscal year 1984, which begins July 1. The plan must now be approved by the State Financial Control Board, the city's chief fiscal monitor. The adoptions, carried out in a brief, good-natured manner, ended deliberations that had left virtually the entire top rank of municipal government red-eyed and irritable. The Board of Estimate vote was unanimous, while the Council had no more than three negative votes, of 42 cast, on the four separate budget bills it approved.

The State Department today welcomed an appeal from Yuri V. Andropov for improved relations and asserted that if Moscow was ready ''to take concrete steps'' it would ''find a ready partner'' in the Reagan Administration. ''For our part, the U.S. approach to relations with the Soviet Union is serious and seeks to explore realistic ways of cooperation to mutual advantage,'' Alan D. Romberg, a State Department spokesman, said. ''Our diplomatic dialogue with the Soviet Union on all outstanding issues is intensive and comprehensive, and will continue.'' On Thursday Mr. Andropov, talking with W. Averell Harriman, a former United States Ambassador to Moscow and a longtime specialist on Soviet affairs, said the Soviet leadership was ''ready and interested in seeking joint initiatives'' that would improve relations with Washington.

Murder charges against a 29-year-old Brooklyn man, accused of killing his mother by mailing her an explosive device in a hollowedout cookbook, were dropped yesterday. The charges against the man, Craig Kipp, were dismissed in State Supreme Court after the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office said the evidence was not sufficient to prove his guilt in the death in May 1982 of his 54-year-old mother, Joan, at her home in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. Police officials declined to say whether there were other suspects in the case, but a Police Department spokesman, Deputy Inspector Robert Burke, said that ''the investigation will have to resume'' in the death of Mrs. Kipp, who was a supervisor of guidance counselors in the city school system. Remains of Device Tested The key evidence against her son, according to an assistant district attorney, Charles Abercrombie, included conclusions about the work of a dog trained in tracking human scents and the finding by a handwriting expert that samples of Mr. Kipp's printing were similar to the printing in the message accompanying the device.

International The State Department welcomed an appeal by Yuri V. Andropov for improved relations. The State Department said that if Moscow was ready ''to take concrete steps'' it would ''find a ready partner'' in the Reagan Administration. The Soviet leader made his appeal at a meeting Thursday in Moscow with W. Averell Harriman. (Page 1, Column 6.) Unease is growing in Argentina over a series of threats, beatings and, in some cases, killings, by politically extremist underground groups. An abiding fear in the country is that the violence might undermine national elections scheduled for October by the military Government. (1:5.)

Gretchen Nicol, a nurse-practitioner who completed advanced studies in a federally financed program at Ohio State University, has examined hundreds of women for early-warning signs of cancer, working in clinics, a doctor's office and as an Air Force Reserve officer. Last summer at Health One, a Blue Cross-affiliated clinic in a middle-class neighborhood in Columbus, Miss Nicol gave a routine checkup to Linda Skaggs, an employee of the Ohio State Medical Board. The board thereupon accused Miss Nicol of ''illegal practice of medicine'' and sued her and Health One in Franklin County Common Pleas Court, seeking an injunction to prohibit examinations for cancer signs by nurses. The case is but one in which the medical authorities in more than a dozen states are using legal and economic weapons to limit the scope of health care administered by 20,000 registered nurse-practitioners. The Ohio medical board, which is run by and regulates physicians, contends that ''breast and pelvic examinations, with an associated Papanicolaou smear,'' or ''Pap smear,'' are ''prohibited acts of medical diagnosis.''