THIS WAS SUPPOSED to be the year when legislators finally owned up to their obligations and took a radical new approach to how they spend money and how they collect it. This was supposed to be the year when lawmakers would finally recognize that nothing will do more to improve our economy and our quality of life, and even to eventually reduce the need for all sorts of expensive government services, than providing the resources necessary for every child in our state to get a decent education.

But with just one day remaining in the 21-week legislative session, there is no hope on any of these fronts:

Lawmakers rejected most of Gov. Mark Sanford’s dramatic budget proposals and didn’t come up with any of their own. So our most crucial agencies remain underfunded while we still fund agencies we could survive without, and we still waste money operating overlapping agencies that provide similar services and sometimes even refuse to cooperate.

Lawmakers got all worked up over trying to provide temporary and troubling fixes to rising property tax bills, while a well-thought-out plan to take a comprehensive approach to our tax system and address the actual problems with it never even got a hearing.

As for public education: Well, we apparently won’t be underfunding the schools quite as badly as this year, but lawmakers still chose to ignore their own legally mandated formula on how much they should spend. And they refused to even consider the idea that as much money should be spent to hire qualified teachers and buy adequate textbooks to educate a child in a poor district as a child who happens to live in a rich district.

Legislators have passed a handful of good bills this year, and there are still a few more that could make it into law before the bell rings at 5 p.m. today, bringing this wretched session to an end. But there are just as many, if not more, bills that could make it through that would do active harm to our state.

The governor’s ill-conceived plan to suck more money out of underfunded government services by cutting income tax rates still could somehow slip through, as could another piecemeal proposal to shift much of the property tax burden off homeowners in popular neighborhoods and onto car owners, businesses and those who own less desirable homes, as well as a handful of small, special-interest tax breaks.

While the bills that would allow the chief executive to actually run the executive branch of government stagnate, bills to strip him of even more power, and in one case revive a completely autonomous agency, are ascendant.

And on a host of other issues, lawmakers are just steps away from doing active harm to our state, from neutering the Judicial Merit Selection Commission to prohibiting counties from regulating chicken farms and taking other actions stronger than state law. And with the rate at which the House is attaching unrelated measures to Senate bills and senators are suddenly shifting gears and signing off on oral compromises on other measures, there’s no telling what else could happen today.

But even if all the good bills still standing manage to pass and none of the harmful ones make it through, the 2004 General Assembly will still be remembered not for any new law passed but for opportunities missed and responsibilities shirked.