ALBANY – Governor Pataki’s budget vetoes, and the Legislature’s failure to override them, are taking a toll on New York’s safety net for the poor, according to social service groups.

For lack of $18 million vetoed by the governor, child-welfare agencies no longer have the staff to screen abusive or neglectful parents for drug and alcohol abuse, meaning more children will end up in foster care, the groups said.

Another veto of $5 million reduced by half the state’s operating support for certain housing organizations, making it harder for low-income tenants to get help dealing with their landlords.

Other vetoes are affecting library patrons, homeless veterans, students at state-financed universities and community colleges, children without health insurance, and people with HIV and AIDS.

It became clear this month that lawmakers will not override the vetoes, which cut $235 million in spending and $1.6 billion in borrowing that the Legislature added to the $103 billion budget for 2004-05.

Lawmakers could restore some of the funds in a supplemental budget early next year, but that seems unlikely given the $6 billion deficit looming in the next fiscal year. As a result, officials at some nonprofit groups said they will have to continue scaling back programs, laying off staff, and, in some cases, closing altogether.

“It’s pretty devastating for us,” the director of a Manhattan drug treatment organization, Jim Little of Veritas, said. “We’re losing a handful of staff, but more important it’s the number of families we won’t be able to serve anymore.”

Mr. Little said the vetoes cost his agency $500,000 of its $6 million budget, forcing him to lay off 10 of 100 employees. Those 10 people worked with child-welfare agencies to identify parents with drug or alcohol problems – a group that accounts for three in four cases of abuse or neglect – and get them into treatment.

“Now you’re going to see the out-of-home placement numbers go back up again,” the director of the New York Association of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Providers, John Coppola, said. “It’s a case of being penny-wise and pound foolish.”

The director of the Neighborhood Preservation Coalition, Joe Dagostine, said the 50% cut in operating subsidies from the state could cause scores of organizations that provide support services for tenants to close their doors.

“It’s an extremely distressful, scary situation that we’re in right now,” Mr. Dagostine said. “There are poor people out there … that need the services of these community-based organizations.” He predicted “chaos.”

When he issued his vetoes in August, Mr. Pataki said he regretted cutting some of the funds but felt he had no choice. The Legislature hadn’t done enough to control the growth of Medicaid and other costly programs, he said.

“The budget that was sent to him spent too much and reformed too little,” a spokesman for the governor’s budget office, Michael Marr, said yesterday. “Moving forward we will continue our efforts to reform programs like Medicaid so the state will have additional resources and the ability to invest more money in worthy programs that benefit New Yorkers across the state.”

When the two houses returned to the Capitol this month, they disregarded pleas to restore the money. Instead, they approved a plan, with the governor’s blessing, that borrows $1.2 billion to renovate the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on the West Side of Manhattan and $350 million on various yet-to-be-identified “economic development projects” elsewhere throughout the state.

“It’s a bit disingenuous to say that there’s no money around,” the director of the Statewide Emergency Network for Social and Economic Security, Ron Deutsch, said. “It seems to be a lack of political will to restore funding for these programs.”

A budget analyst at the Manhattan Institute, E.J. McMahon, agreed that Mr. Pataki and the Legislature have done a poor job of choosing which programs to cut and which to preserve, but he said there’s no question that deeper cuts are necessary.

“If people are saying, ‘Hey, what’s the rhyme or reason to this?’ welcome to the New York State budget,” Mr. McMahon said.