Only a few agencies that the Butler County Human Services Department contracts with are having serious financial problems related to the lack of a state budget.

About six out of the more than 100 agencies the department contracts with have reported being low on cash, but Joyce Ainsworth, human services director, declined to name those agencies.

For these agencies, the department has lent them money so they can continue to provide services.

“We’re able to do that for a while,” Ainsworth said.

In Harrisburg, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and the Republican-controlled Legislature have not been able to agree on a state budget. July 1 was the deadline to have a budget in place.

Ann Brown, county fiscal operations officer for human services, said the contractors that are having trouble primarily are used by Children and Youth Services and Mental Health. She too declined to name the contractors.

Brown said these contractors are mainly small providers who have trouble getting big lines of credit or developing reserves.

Ainsworth said human services has some funding left over from fiscal year 2014 so it has not had to ask county officials for extra money yet. She said the department will check its cash flow weekly.

Most of the other contractors are able to stay afloat with their own reserve funds or lines of credit.

Brown said that the department told its contractors earlier this year to seek lines of credit or use their reserves to stay operational.

When the contractors are no longer able to use their reserves or have maxed out their credit, they have been told to contact their director at the department to discuss using county money temporarily, Brown said.

When the state passes a budget and the state money comes flowing again, Brown said the department will repay the county.

Ainsworth said most of the other contractors have enough credit and reserves to be OK until the end of the month.

“Then we’re going to have some real problems,” Ainsworth said.

Some departments under human services rely on state money more than others. For example, the Area Agency on Aging is entirely state funded, and Intellectual Disabilities is mostly state funded.

“We are pretty reliant on state money,” Ainsworth said.

For now, Ainsworth said these departments have not experienced funding problems. She noted that AAA has some left over funding from 2014, and Intellectual Disabilities gets funding through a waiver program, which is federal money distributed through the state — so it still is getting funding.

County human services provides services to roughly 20,000 clients.