The notion that county commissioners are duly elected officials shouldn't be a radical idea among Minnesota legislators. But it must be, judging from the many shackles legislators have put on county decisionmaking through the years.

Now the counties are pushing back. A multiyear "Minnesota Redesign Project" by the Association of Minnesota Counties has identified hundreds of program mandates and spending requirements deemed ripe for repeal or modification. It makes a strong case that this tight-money year is the right time for those changes. Fewer and less restrictive mandates would make consolidating and streamlining local government easier and less damaging for the people served.

More than that: The counties are asking legislators to trust them to make sound, cost-effective choices about how best to serve their constituents. And they say they are willing to be held accountable for the results. They want a new partnership with the state, said county association CEO Jim Mulder, "and partnerships are about trusting each other."

The counties' ideas got a rush of attention earlier this year, including a mention in Gov. Tim Pawlenty's State of the State address. But last week, at the session's midpoint, one county lobbyist grumbled they've lost momentum and been "orphaned" in the face of a massive state budget deficit.

That assessment would likely surprise the dozen or so legislators who have put portions of the counties' proposals into bill form. House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher said Friday that county mandate relief legislation "will start speeding up" shortly.

But this much is evident: Eliminating some county mandates, especially those that require counties to spend at prescribed "maintenance of effort" levels to help snare federal matching funds, could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars. In the face of a deficit in 2010-11 that would reach $6.4 billion were it not for federal stimulus aid, spending more state money to help counties spend less is not an easy sell at the Capitol.

That's one of two reasons the county proposal is running into resistance. The other, noted Senate Finance Committee chair Dick Cohen, DFL-St. Paul, is that a number of county spending mandates exist in state law because past practice proved that without them, some of the good government should do might not get done.

A 2006 mandate for counties to maintain mental health spending at 2004-05 levels could be a case in point. It's among the most contentious of the counties' proposals. As one mental-health advocate put it, in the not-distant past, "some counties' idea of a mental-health program was a bus ticket to Minneapolis."

That day should not return. But neither should counties keep bumping into the kind of inflexibility that Murray County, population about 9,000, met recently. Its juvenile mental-health treatment costs dropped $60,000 from 2004-05 levels when two young people turned 18 and moved away, Mulder said. But state rules required the county to keep spending at the former level. The rule, not actual need for services, drove spending, he said.

That situation seems to augur for replacing a maintenance-of-effort rule with a clear mandate to serve the mentally ill, and accountability for measurable results. But determining what measures best assess the adequacy of mental-health services is a complicated matter. It's likely not something that the Legislature can do wisely and well in the two months remaining in this deficit-dominated session.

The 2009 Legislature should go as far as it can toward scrapping mandates that only cause headaches and extra costs for counties -- and whose elimination would not enlarge the state deficit. And it should do two things more: It should establish study groups for the thorniest of the state-county issues, mental-health care among them, to recommend wise changes to the 2010 Legislature. And it should create a simple and speedy process for individual counties to seek waivers from state mandates that stand in the way of sound ideas for saving money.