Pennsylvania has a budget for the upcoming fiscal year passed earlier this month, “just” 12 days late; but to make that happen required the members of the General Assembly and Gov. Josh Shapiro to dodge some major issues, many urgently in need of resolution.

The passage marks progress toward elected officials meeting their state Constitutionally-mandated duty to have a spending plan in place by June 30 of each year compared to last year’s more-than-four-month-late budget. However, there’s only so much applause you can give people for almost doing their jobs as decreed by the highest law in the state.

A big part of the problem is the law includes no penalties for not completing their work on time, only a mandate to pass a spending plan by June 30.

Presumably, the intent was that voter would impose punishment at the ballot box. In reality, as the issue is not confined to either major party, by the time the next election rolls around, those whose jobs should be in peril have convinced voters it’s the other side’s fault or that the consequences for voting them out in favor of someone new are far more dire than a late state budget.

As a result, the wheels keep turning, the bickering over pet projects continues and the same people keep their positions just to repeat the cycle again the following year, all while every single person involved collects a six-figure salary — more than $110,000 per year plus a $198 per diem as a base rate for the General Assembly and nearly $230,000 per year for the governor — as reward for failing to fulfill one of the primary duties of their position.

While this year does mark far less of a delay to pass a budget, the price of doing so was some fuzzy accounting and solidly kicking the can down the line on some very important issues, many of which must be resolved very soon to avoid serious issues for the citizens of Pennsylvania.

To make the math work for the $50.8 billion fiscal plan, the legislature had to pull money from “special funds” and delay payments to things like the state’s Medicaid managed care organizations.

It also required leaving some issues in the lurch for the time being — a situation made worse by the fact that after the flurry of activity to pass the measure on a Sunday, both houses of the General Assembly immediately went back into recess with no session days scheduled. The House later added session days, including a nonvoting day on July 22 followed by a voting session on July 23, but did not take up any of the outstanding issues left in the wake of the budget passage.

Perhaps the most urgent item in need of action that was left unresolved was the regulation and taxation of skill games in the state.

Unlike many of the other issues still outstanding, this one has a hard deadline courtesy of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. When the court ruled skill games are legally slot machines and therefore subject to the same rules as those gambling devices, it put a 120-day stay on enforcement of the ruling. That means the legislature has until October to act, or all of the bars, restaurants, gas stations, skill games parlors, clubs and countless other establishments where the machines have popped up outside of casinos will be subject to seeing them confiscated.

Not only that, but all of the revenue those businesses bring in from the machines will disappear overnight. Continuing to operate them after the deadline would subject a business to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

For most of the time between now and that deadline, both the state House and Senate are scheduled to be in recess.

The budget also fails to do anything to address the shortage of housing and transit funding the entities running those state programs say are essential to continuing to serve the people of Pennsylvania. It’s a situation that represents a ticking time bomb before a crisis emerges in which these organizations simply cannot provide the services so many residents rely on for a place to live or a ride to work any longer.

Given just those issues, the fact that regulation of data centers, which are set to rapidly encroach on some areas of the state; and a framework for legalized recreational marijuana, an industry surrounding states have long since addressed to their fiscal benefit and our loss to the tune of an estimated $140 million per year in just tax revenue, let alone in dollars going into the hands of Pennsylvanians the industry would employ, seem almost paltry.

So by all means, give our governor and members of the General Assembly the credit due for only being 12 days late this year, but keep in mind this is the fifth year straight our elected officials have flouted the Pennsylvania Constitution and missed the deadline, keep in mind the issues left on the table and most importantly, keep in mind it’s an election year.