EUGENE, Ore. — The legislative traveling show didn’t sing and it didn’t dance. Instead, it heard the blues.

For two weeks, the Legislature’s Joint Ways and Means Committee played to packed halls across the state, from Lincoln City to Pendleton and points between.

The Oregonian newspapers reports people waited in line to unload their problems.

When the tour ended Friday in Eugene, the lawmakers had heard a flood of concerns about what might happen as the Legislature trims billions of dollars from the recession-hammered 2009-11 state budget.

The main theme, as a slightly jaded Rep. Dennis Richardson, R-Central Point, put it, was: “Gore someone else’s ox. Don’t gore my ox.”

But legislators likely will hear the voices in their heads as they try to produce a budget.

Straight-A college students talked about having to leave school because of tuition increases.

Former addicts talked about being saved by state treatment programs slated to disappear.

Business owners warned that tax increases aimed at softening the cuts would result in immediate layoffs.

“We will not balance this budget on the backs of the most vulnerable citizens,” Sen. Margaret Carter, D-Portland, pledged to a jammed room of more than 500 at Southern Oregon University in Ashland on Thursday night.

But skeptics said potential cuts, equal to 30 percent of state agency budgets, suggest otherwise.

Francis Turney of Grants Pass begged the panel not to eliminate treatment for compulsive gamblers.

“I’m speaking to you as someone who suffered from that disease,” said Turney, who retired from the Anchorage police force and moved to Oregon, where she became hooked on video poker.

“I would be dead if I did not receive those state treatments.”

At the same hearing, SOU student Sarah Rudeen broke into tears over a possible 7 percent rise in tuition. “The reality is, my parents provide little support, said Rudeen, 19, a sophomore from Fort Collins, Colo. “I’ll owe $25,000 if I take out the maximum in federal loans.”

The tone was the same when an overflow crowd addressed the panel at Portland Community College. They lined the walls of the auditorium and sat cross-legged on the floor, writing testimony in longhand and filled two steno notebooks with budget pleas.

Duane Worley, a recovering addict, was driving a car containing meth, raw ingredients for meth and his 4-year-old son when police pulled him over five years ago. Worley went into state-sponsored treatment.

“I was a broken man. I was hopeless. My soul had been taken from me. I had no personal social skills. I could not talk right. I could not act right,” Worley said to a hot, hushed room.

Long-term treatment, he said, taught him to control his anger and take better care of his children. “Most of all, it showed me I had a soul, I was human, and I was worth saving.”

PCC student Misty Nichols testified from her wheelchair, facing a panel of lawmakers she couldn’t see because she lacks the money for glasses.

“I want to become a juvenile court judge. I want to help your children and your children’s’ families so they don’t have to live with what a lot of my family has had to live with, which is abuse and a lot of negative things I don’t want to go into at this

time,” she said.

At each session, Carter and her Ways and Means co-chairman, Rep. Peter Buckley, D-Ashland, said income tax revenues are likely to fall as much as $4 billion short of what is needed to maintain current services.

“How many here, if you call 9-1-1, want someone to respond?” Buckley asked the Ashland meeting.

“Think about cutting 20 percent from your own budget,” he said. “How do you put clothes on your kids? How do you put gas in the car? How do you take care of people who depend on you?”

In Klamath Falls, Carter and Buckley ended up at a Thai restaurant.

Carter worked the restaurant like a candidate, stopping at each table to see if anyone wanted to talk state finances. Nearly everyone did, The Oregonian reported.

John Rojas, a gas distributor, said the school system is in trouble and can’t raise taxes for help. Too many retired people have moved to Southern Oregon, Rojas said.

“They tend to vote down school levies,” he said. “They’re forgetting that’s our future.”

Rep. Bill Garard, R-Klamath Falls, said the hearings helped air deep worries about the future of state services. But most people he talked with have succumbed to what amounts to a budget funk.

“There’s a certain amount of resignation that it’s out of their control,” Garard said, “that all you can do in Klamath is respond to what they do in Salem. They’ll try to do the best with what they’re given.”