When New York City banned trans fats and required calorie counts on menus two years ago, its Health Department launched a massive campaign to ease the laws’ passage. Subway riders were inundated with slick public service ads. Health inspectors were briefed en masse about what to look for in restaurant kitchens. Cooks trying to cut out trans fats could even call a chef hotline for tips on how to tweak their recipes.

Now state politicians are following Bloomberg’s lead and trying to enact their own trans fat bans and calorie count requirements, with the State Senate reworking a bill originally put forward by Gov. David Paterson.

The changes have been discussed for several years in Albany, though the Senate’s Republican majority did not move on the legislation and the coup delayed Senate Democrats from taking action on them. The proposals do not face much opposition, even from industry groups like the New York State Restaurant Association, which is working with legislators on the details. Public health experts almost unanimously support both ideas.

For several of the counties that have enacted their own food regulations— Nassau, Westchester, Suffolk, Albany and Broome counties have banned trans fats, Westchester and Ulster now have calorie postings—the idea of statewide, centralized regulations has elicited both enthusiasm and dread.

But the main worries, according to advocates, are about how the state will enforce major lifestyle changes in disparate regions across the state with a tight budget and a short timeline.

“Cost is a huge issue for every part of the state,” said the New York State Restaurant Association’s Melissa Fleischut. “New York City is great because it’s one health department, one set of inspectors. But if you go upstate, there must be 40 or 50 different health departments and different health inspectors.”

The trans-fat bill would give restaurants and bakeries a year to phase out their old oils. If passed by the end of March, the bill would give the state 14 months to educate business owners about the regulations  and to teach health inspectors how to enforce them. But industry representatives say that the state lacks the resources that the city had during its pre-recession anti-trans-fat campaign, and the small health departments in each county have only small budgets, leaving them unable to make up the difference.

Though results have been relatively positive, statewide industry organizations claim that the disparities between each county’s rules have made it expensive and confusing for chains to abide by all of them—New York City allows fast-food restaurants to post minimum and maximum calorie counts per menu item, for example, but some counties ask the same restaurants to post an average.

A statewide law would solve that problem. But it would also override New York City’s policy, which many industry representatives say is the best-crafted one. Only two years after pushing through their own changes, city officials say, a new state law asking city business owners to change their practices again would be unpopular and confusing.

“We would not support state legislation that would interfere with the successful rule in New York City or that would excessively restrict local action,” said New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Farley, testifying at a State Senate Health Committee hearing in January. “We have concerns regarding the timeline for implementation, as well as potential preemption related to local action on other nutritional information.”

And at the same time, the federal government has included a calorie-counting provision in federal healthreform, which, if passed, would override all state and city efforts.

Denise Soffel, the top staffer on the Senate Health Committee, noted that most restaurants have already stopped using trans fats in everything except for baked goods. And she added that it makes sense to institute a statewide law as soon as possible, before more counties take action and create a patchwork of laws that chains will find hard to follow.

“If we had heard from the industry that this was impossible to do, we would have stepped back and taken another look. But we didn’t,” she said. “It certainly is our goal to make it as easy for the restaurants as we can.”