Editorial: A wish list for action in Albany

State lawmakers will wind up their current session next Thursday, and there are still plenty of issues to address and resolve. Many, of course, won't be addressed or resolved at all, leaving a load of work for next time around. But several things can still be accomplished. Here's what taxpayers deserve from our lawmakers before they leave Albany. But first, one thing they don't.

NASSAU BORROWING: A Senate bill that would allow Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano to bypass his state financial control board and county legislature to borrow money must die. The need for a supermajority of the county legislature to borrow is an important check on power. The need for control board approval to borrow, while in a control period, is even more crucial: It's how control boards work, and with other municipalities teetering on the edge of control periods of their own, it's irresponsible for legislators to approve an end run around this power. Nassau officials have been boasting that their little plan is a done deal, but this concept is a terrible one and needs to be stymied.

The rest of the list needs to be approved.

TEACHER EVALUATIONS: All parties in the struggle over releasing teacher evaluations to the public need to find a solution based on the fact that the key goal is not to embarrass educators, but to use this information to identify and improve or discharge bad teachers. Exactly how and when the evaluations are released have become powerful distractions from the real goals of education reform.

MARIJUANA: Decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana in public view is a good start toward defusing the problems of stop-and-frisk in New York City, and mustn't be allowed to bog down, as it has at least momentarily, over whether the right limit is just shy of an ounce or less than that amount.

SUFFOLK TRAFFIC BUREAU: Suffolk County needs a traffic violations bureau to keep $8 million to $10 million more of ticket revenue each year. The State Legislature has to approve such a bureau, and should do it to help Suffolk address its enormous budget challenges.

PENSION DATA: It would be wise of legislators to end the argument over transparency of public pensions with a clear law: This is public money, and thus public information, even for retirees.

ABUSE OF THE DISABLED: The new agency Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is pushing to investigate abuse of patients at state-owned homes for disabled adults needs to wind its way past the objections of unions and their supporters in the Assembly and come into being. Assuring humane, appropriate treatment of these patients is too important to fall prey to political maneuvering.

MENTALLY ILL AND GUNS: The legislature should give judges the power to take guns and permits to possess them away from people involuntarily committed to an institution, ordered into assisted outpatient treatment or found not guilty of a crime by reason of mental disease or defect. The Assembly has repeatedly passed a bill to do that, and the Senate should too.

KENDRA'S LAW: To reduce the chance that someone who is violent when not on medication can drift away from supervision and stop taking prescribed drugs, the legislature should amend the involuntary assisted treatment program created by Kendra's Law. This law allows caseworkers and others to seek a court order requiring a patient to comply with treatment. Pending legislation, for instance, would not allow a court order for assisted treatment to expire without a review to determine if it should be extended. And if an outpatient under supervision relocated, officials would be required to alert those in the new county of residence.

Deliver all this, and Albany will have made progress in bettering the state this year.