ALBANY – The Assembly is returning to the Capitol this week to vote on overriding some of Governor Pataki’s 195 budget vetoes.

In a formal rebuke to the Republican governor, the Democrat-led Assembly is expected to seek restoration of as many as 96 spending items worth $116 million.

It cannot take the first step on the remaining 99 vetoes – which affect another $120 million in current-year spending and about $1.6 billion in borrowing – because they involve budget bills that originated in the Republican led Senate.

The Assembly’s votes, coming in the middle of legislative elections, will increase the pressure on Republican senators to approve the extra money for schools, libraries, colleges, universities, welfare programs, and prisons.

According to Governor Pataki, however, undoing the vetoes would throw the budget out of balance, and make it even more difficult to close next year’s gap between revenues and expenses, which he projects to be more than $6 billion.

Whatever lawmakers choose to do, state spending for 2004-04 will exceed $101 billion – making this the first 12-figure budget in state history. Mr. Pataki’s vetoes, if allowed to stand, would reduce overall spending by about one quarter of 1%.

This the second straight year that Mr. Pataki has made extensive use of his line-item veto to prune spending from the budget approved by the Legislature. Last year, facing a deficit of $12 billion, legislative leaders broke off negotiations with the governor and approved a budget that temporarily raised sales taxes and income taxes on the wealthy to avoid more extensive budget cuts. Working in concert, Senate Republicans and Assembly Democrats moved quickly to override all 119 of the governor’s vetoes.

This year the stakes are not as high and the battle lines not as clearly drawn. With the economy improving, the budget gap to be closed was about $5 billion. The governor’s own $99.8 billion budget, released in January, did not attempt to repeal the tax hikes he had opposed the year before and included relatively modest cuts in spending. And, although the governor never reached agreement with legislative leaders on a budget, he concurred on much of the spending that they added – including a 5% increase in aid for public schools worth $500 million.

In another contrast to last year, the Senate Republicans’ position remains ambiguous. The majority leader, Joseph Bruno of Rensselaer County, initially expressed disappointment with the governor’s vetoes and has never ruled out overrides. He has signaled, however, that his house will not reconvene until mid-November, when elections are over. Under the constitution, however, the Legislature can take up overrides as late as December 31 of the year they were issued.

With the Assembly likely to support any overrides, groups who want the vetoes reversed will focus their lobbying on the Senate. Among the groups likely to clamor the loudest will be colleges and universities, which want more than $1 billion for building projects restored to the budget, and officials in the hospital industry, who lost $250 million in capital funding to Mr. Pataki’s knife.

The Senate is also under pressure to undo Mr. Pataki’s veto of a $2 increase in the minimum wage, which would raise the hourly amount to $7.15 by January 2007.

Meanwhile, the Assembly is resisting pressure from Republicans and law enforcement groups to amend the capital punishment law, which was ruled unconstitutional by the state’s highest court in June.

The Senate voted last month to approve a proposal by the governor designed to address the court ruling. But the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver of Manhattan, said last week that his house wants to conduct hearings on the future of the death penalty before taking up the legislation.

The Assembly does have one item on its agenda apart from overriding vetoes: It plans to reverse one of its own budget decisions of last month that has proven unpopular with local government officials, especially upstate and on Long Island. The measure in question, originally proposed by the governor, would divert about $17.8 million a year in revenue to the state from local governments from speeding tickets.