There are some good things in the budget agreed to late last week by state lawmakers and Gov. Josh Shapiro.

Pulling out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is a win for everyone who pays an electric bill in Pennsylvania. Additional school aid should help keep school taxes down a bit, something we’re sure Warren County taxpayers will appreciate. Creating a tax credit for low-income families will put a little more money in some people’s pockets at tax time. Cyber charter school reform is billed as saving public schools roughly $175 million statewide. And the state is spending less of its Rainy Day Fund than originally proposed.

Those are all good things.

But let’s not act as if this process was the type of governance Pennsylvanians deserve. Neither Republicans nor Democrats should be taking a victory lap now that the budget is signed. For all the annoyance with the federal government for using the American public as pawns during the federal government shutdown, Republicans and Democrats in Pennsylvania did the same exact thing for roughly four times longer than their federal counterparts. Programs that count on the state government showing some level of competence spent four months trying to figure out how to keep programs running and staff members paid while state lawmakers did everything but pass a budget. And, a governor whose state just had a budget passed four months late can’t really claim to have used strong leadership to bring House Democrats and Senate Republicans together. If that were the case the budget would have been a couple of weeks late, not four months past due. State lawmakers have a responsibility to pass a budget on time given the dependence on state tax dollars to pay for critical programs.

This budget is one that most Pennsylvanians can probably live with. In that sense the state’s elected officials did their job. But the fact that the budget is acceptable in the end doesn’t mean the process is one that should be repeated next year – or ever again, for that matter.