With so much unfinished business, the Pennsylvania General Assembly was wrong in adjourning its two-year session prior to the constitutionally mandated Nov. 30 close. Lawmakers should have continued to pursue compromises with the Rendell administration on important unresolved issues, not retreat from the legislative responsibility they were elected to carry out.

The only immediate savings to taxpayers from the adjournment action early Sunday is the $126 per-diem pay each lawmaker relinquished for not remaining in session. Lawmakers will still receive their regular salary, however.

Taxpayers also are saving because the legislature did not vote on raising legislative salaries, as well as those of judges and top executive appointees. However, lawmakers would have appeared more fiscally responsible if they actually had voted and rejected the raises - even if only for legislators.

While the legislature's unfinished business - including the issue of borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up abandoned mines and preserve open space, and changes to the new state gambling law - is troubling, what is even more troubling is the bitterness that these latest days of the legislative session produced between the administration and lawmakers. The acrimony will be carried over to the new session that begins in January, as partisanship again takes hold and presumably intensifies under the Capitol dome.

The bottom line of this session's legislative exercise is that it mimicked what has happened so many times in the past: Lawmakers were faced with cramming a big agenda of unfinished business into a small end-of-session time frame. Also, they risked voting on provisions with which they were not fully familiar.

That's because lawmakers were so unproductive during the bulk of the session, playing politics instead.

Pennsylvania needs a smaller window of legislative time, so there is less time for lawmakers to waste. Some other states get more done in much less time, and so could the Pennsylvania General Assembly, if the avenue for partisanship wasn't so wide.

Unfortunately, as long as state residents continue to accept the unproductive status quo, nothing is destined to change.

Judge this legislative session as mediocre. Pennsylvania residents deserve better, even when the executive and legislative branches of the state government aren't controlled by the same party.

- J.R.K.