The damage that the industry-drafted telecommunications bill before the Legislature will do to your family budget can be prevented only if Floridians tell lawmakers to reject it.

This controversial legislation was introduced 37 days after the Legislature's filing deadline by amending its 42-pages onto another single-page bill in the Senate. It wasn't filed as a bill by March 4, like all other legislation, so that residents might have had advance warning of what the local telecommunications industry and its legislative friends were planning for consumers.

The three largest local companies will lose $362 million annually from reducing access fees paid by long-distance phone companies -- this is called ''rebalancing.'' BellSouth's loss is projected at $135 million. The proposed new law will allow BellSouth to increase your local rates to make up the difference.

Current law limits increases in your local phone rate to inflation, minus 1 percent. Inflation was 1.79 percent last year, so BellSouth and the state's other local providers could legally raise your local rate about one-eighth of 1 percent, or nine cents, if you pay the top BellSouth rate of $11.04. Thus your new rate would be $11.13 under current law. This would change dramatically under the proposed bill.

BellSouth says that local rates may go up by $3.50 per month, which is a 32-percent increase if your local bill is $11.04. That's right: the Legislature is considering allowing a 32-percent increase in annual phone rates as compared to the less than 1 percent allowed now. So, under the proposed legislation, your local phone-bill rate could jump to $14.54 in the next two years.

The American Association of Retired Persons, Florida Legal Services and Florida Utility Watch have concluded that the bill's language proposing to return rate regulation to the Public Service Commission and re moving it from the Legislature would make the PSC nothing more than a rubber stamp for future rate increases.

Also, there is a hidden trigger in the bill. After rebalancing is completed, BellSouth could raise your local rate by 20 percent per year, every year, without PSC permission. In three years, your local phone-bill rate thus would be up another $2.91, to $17.45.

Under this legislation, at the beginning of year four, your bill could be hiked up to $20.94 a month. The beginning of the fifth year could see your bill at $25.13, or 127 percent of your current rate. You will then be paying $169.08 a year more than can legally be charged now. These increases were part of a similar bill that Gov. Jeb Bush vetoed last year.

Even the bill's proposed intent to expand service for Lifeline customers, the needy who are guaranteed reasonable phone rates, is misleading. What it would do is make Lifeline customers subject to all the rate increases after two years, causing many of them to lose service. Improvements to Lifeline should be made independent of unsupportable rate increases.

The bill also includes a provision that appears designed to limit the ability of local government to continue regulating cable-TV companies, which would allow already erratic cable service to decline even more. And it essentially eliminates current customer-service standards.

Tell your legislators that you will not tolerate their increasing your rates by adopting this legislation. You can contact them through a link at www.floridautilitywatch.com

Mike Twomey, a former assistant Florida attorney general, is president of Florida Utility Watch, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting consumers from regulated utility excesses.