As part of his effort to convince legislators to pass a tax package, state budget director Shawn Sullivan used the example this week of the dire impact that funding cuts would have on the state’s two psychiatric hospitals in Larned and Osawatomie.

His warning probably was true, but it’s hard to see how the situation at those two facilities can get much worse.

Even without additional cuts that may be instituted, both hospitals are seriously understaffed and having to turn away people in need of help because of the staffing shortages. Recent information from the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services, which oversees the hospitals, shows the magnitude of the problem.

Osawatomie State Hospital is supposed to have 501 full-time employees, but KDADS reported late last month that 189 of those positions were vacant. That’s a vacancy rate of nearly 40 percent. The situation at Larned State Hospital is about the same. The facility, located southwest of Great Bend, should have 930 full-time positions, but KDADS reported 322, or about 35 percent, of those positions were vacant. The vacancy rate was even higher for part-time positions.

A couple of news stories published late last month called attention to the staffing problem. Employees are being hit with mandatory overtime to help keep the facilities running. Working conditions are stressful and salaries are too low to hold on to workers. A KDADS representative told a Wichita news reporter that although the department was able to hire 68 new employees at Larned during the first quarter of 2015, 73 workers resigned during the same period.

A Topeka reporter told the story of a man who recently retired after working for 27 years in state hospitals in Kansas. For the last 12 years, he had received no raises except for some cost-of-living adjustments. The last couple of years, he worked at Osawatomie, where he said he witnessed conditions that posed safety risks for both patients and staff.

The Topeka newspaper also cited emails it had obtained that indicate officials at Larned State Hospital were begging employees to work overtime to fill shifts that were scheduled to begin just a few hours after the emails were sent. The call went out after the hospital already had mandated overtime for everyone they could and still couldn’t fill the shifts.

KDADS has appointed a new Adult Continuum of Care Committee, which, according to a news release, “is charged with reviewing the state’s behavioral health system.” The committee, the release said, will “build upon the accomplishments” last year of the Governor’s Mental Health Task Force. Perhaps the new committee’s concrete impact on the state’s psychiatric hospitals will be more apparent than “the accomplishments” of last year’s task force.

Sullivan is right that the $3.5 million these two hospitals would lose if the governor institutes across-the-board 6.2 percent funding cuts would be devastating, but conditions at these facilities already are way beyond what state officials should tolerate. State legislators should be ashamed that they are leaving this staffing problem unaddressed for another year.