Legislators return to Olympia for a special session Nov. 28. For the fourth year in a row they will try to balance the state’s budget.

It won’t be pretty.

Just months after the Legislature passed a budget that included $4.6 billion in cuts, the state faces another $2 billion shortfall. Those billions mean real people with real needs will be hurt.

The options to balance the budget will be many. Gov. Chris Gregoire already has proposed $1.5 billion in cuts, including:

• Eliminating subsidized health care to 35,000 people who are on the state’s Basic Health Plan.

• Cutting the state’s food-assistance program.

• Cutting the time people can receive welfare aid.

• Reducing the amount of time most felons are under state supervision once they are released from prison.

• Cutting state support to colleges and universities by 15 percent.

There’s more – painfully more. And the Legislature hasn’t even weighed in yet.

There will a be rush by some for tax increases, but that should be a last resort – if considered at all. Almost every household in the state is facing its own budget shortfall. They can’t be expected to bail the state out of its.

A better approach would be to look at tax breaks and state services that don’t put our most vulnerable residents in the cross-hairs.

It’s true that eliminating such things also has a downside. But the bottom line must be, which is worse: telling a poor person with a painful dental or medical condition to just live with it, or telling a business or industry that the rationale for a tax break has outlived its benefit to the state?

Likewise, while the state has eliminated a number of boards and commissions, can anyone in the Legislature say that those that remain are “critical” to the state’s well-being? We doubt it.

Finally, Gregoire and the Legislature once again must try to bring state workers into the real world regarding wages and benefits. We don’t want to sound like Ebenezer Scrooge, but the reality for many non-government workers is that they haven’t received raises – cost-of-living or otherwise – for years and their share of such things as insurance benefits is steadily climbing.

Would being part of that same reality be painful for state workers? Sure. But they and what they do is no more important than what those in the private sector do every day.

No one should relish what the governor and Legislature will have to face starting Nov. 28. But that has become the ongoing reality for individuals and other institutions in our state. Others have adapted; the state can, too.

– Craig Groshart, Bellevue Reporter