Note: Correction appended.

Governor Paterson’s dramatic “call for action” on the state’s rapidly widening deficit is inspiring a backlash from lawmakers and other powerful statehouse players.

In a rare televised address, which effectively marked an early start to next year’s budget negotiations, Mr. Paterson vowed to rein in excess state spending, raising the specter of state layoffs and cuts to areas that are normally off-limits in Albany and ordering lawmakers back to the capital next month to deal with the problem.

“This situation will get worse before it gets better. We can’t wait and hope this problem will resolve itself,” Mr. Paterson said yesterday, delivering the speech from the Capitol’s ceremonial Red Room. “These times call for action, and today I promise you there will be action.”

Immediately afterward, the Legislature’s top Democrat and the largest union of state employees warned Mr. Paterson to watch where he aims the budget ax.

“What programs will be cut? Whose services will be diminished or eliminated?” the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, said in a statement.

The speaker, who has urged the governor to raise taxes on wealthy residents, said Mr. Paterson “must not” cut back on aid to public schools in New York City and other urban areas or cut “nursing home and home care services.”

The president of the Civil Service Employees Association, Daniel Donohue, said in a statement that Mr. Paterson’s hint of major layoffs, which would be the first since the Cuomo administration, is “nothing but a sham.”

Mr. Donohue, whose union represents 75,000 public employees, about 40% of the state work force, said: “At a time when we need better and bolder solutions, the governor is relying on failed policies from the past.”

The governor, who delivered a memorized five-minute speech that was urgent in tone but short on details, said the state’s budget gap next year had grown by more than 25%, to $6.4 billion, in the past three months, as a weakening real estate market, tumult in the financial industry, and rising fuel prices have dragged down revenue estimates.

The governor’s office said it would release more details about its deficit-closing plan today.

For a rookie governor seeking to demonstrate his authority, Mr. Paterson’s decision to take to the airwaves was an effective piece of political stagecraft, Albany observers noted.

By voicing his concerns in such an unusual way, he put the state’s finances at the center of attention and turned up the heat on lawmakers who would rather have waited until after the fall elections to decide on cutbacks.

Mr. Paterson, a former state senator and a sharp observer of the legislative dynamic, sought not only to convey his command of the state’s perilous financial situation, but also to spread responsibility for the state’s finances to the 212 lawmakers.

“He’s asking them to own up to the fact that they have to play a role in solving the problem. They can’t just get away with campaigning and ignoring it,” the deputy research director of the Citizens Budget Commission, Elizabeth Lynam, said.

In language that could have been lifted from “The Grapes of Wrath,” Mr. Paterson described a state whose residents are scraping out a living and deciding between “heating their homes” or “feeding their children.”

With the clanging of the tocsin, Mr. Paterson summoned lawmakers from their summer vacations, private jobs, and election-year campaigning to come to Albany for a special session scheduled for August 19. They were supposed to be on break until the beginning of next year.

“We’re going to end the legislators’ vacations and bring them back to Albany to reprioritize the way we have managed New York State’s finances,” he said. “For too long, we have done less with more and paid more for less. Now government will do what families have done when their incomes have fallen. We will cut spending. I can’t do it alone.”

Exactly what he will call on them to do during their excursion is not certain.

Mr. Paterson is trying to broker a deal with the Assembly on a property tax cap that would impose a strict limit on how much school districts in small town, suburban, and rural areas can levy each year.

While Assembly Democrats have shunned the idea of tax cap, Mr. Paterson is aiming to soften their position by embracing one of their top priorities, expanding heating oil subsidies to lower-income residents to counter rising prices.

“I will do everything I can to make sure that New York’s families don’t freeze when it gets cold,” the governor said.

Though the issues of a tax cap and heating oil assistance are likely to top the agenda next month, neither one has much bearing over next year’s budget gap. In fact, a passage of an oil bill would only add to Albany’s expenses.

The governor has indicated that he will also encourage lawmakers to consider passing at least one significant cost-saving measure, but he has not elaborated on what it might be.

Correction: Governor Paterson delivered his speech from the Capitol’s ceremonial Red Room. An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified this location.