While the budget cuts spending on social service programs, education, and healthcare, a series of other measures likely will cost counties throughout Florida up to $1 billion.
From funding local court programs, to figuring out how to finance recycling initiatives, local leaders say enacting these ''mandates'' will cause a strain on local governments that were already forced to slash their budgets last year by the Legislature.
''If people aren't receiving services, they're not going to ask their state legislator about it,'' said Hialeah Mayor Julio Robaina. ``They're going to come to the mayor's office, or their city council, and say that the city is not taking care of their needs.''
Gretchen Harkins, a Broward County lobbyist, said the budget cuts will have a multiplier effect on the county's social services programs because Broward goes further than most other counties to supplement state programs.
For example, a $1.6 million cut from elderly services and $3.18 million less for low-income pregnant women will severely hinder county programs' ability to meet current needs.
''It's going to have a direct impact on the most frail and vulnerable elders,'' Harkins said.
She said that the cuts will allow the county to cover fewer poor, pregnant women who are not eligible for Medicaid, force it to reduce drug-abuse treatment to hundreds of parents before a court will allow them to regain custody of their children and scale back primary-care health coverage to hundreds of poor working families.
''More people will lose their children and more children will go into the [foster care] system,'' she said. ``These cuts will mean that people will die, or end up in the street.''
Also potentially burdening Miami-Dade and Broward counties is a looming $3 billion upgrade to the counties' waste-water management systems. Miami-Dade and Broward leaders have been fighting a proposal, that is poised to pass this session, that would require the South Florida counties to stop pumping treated sewage into the ocean. The two counties would have until 2025 to upgrade their six water treatment facilities.
''It's good in concept, but who's going to pay for it?'' said Jess McCarty, a Miami-Dade assistant county attorney who monitors legislative issues.
Residents in both counties may actually end up soaking up some of the costs, with an extra $20 tacked on to their water bills, according to a University of Florida study.
For the past seven years the state has passed 471 ''unfunded mandates'' -- bills that require local governments to enact programs, but fail to provide state funds to finance them.
The trend of shifting costs and programs to counties and cites has escalated over the past decade, said Dr. Lance deHaven Smith, a public administration professor at Florida State University. He is conducting a study on the impact of the mandates to local governments.
''To put it in simple terms, you have to keep up with [state mandated road-building programs to keep up with growth], but you don't have to have new playgrounds or libraries,'' deHaven Smith said.
``It's these other programs that start getting squeezed out.''
