Gov. Mark Dayton uses his Facebook page to give a lengthy explanation of why he settled the state shutdown over the budget crisis by agreeing to Republican plans to delay school payments and borrowing on the tobacco payments.

Although many DFLers felt he gave in, Dayton writes: “[A]fter two weeks of the state government shutdown, I decided that someone had to take the initiative to resolve the stalemate.”

He calls it “the best option available to Minnesota.”

He writes:

 Some of my friends are upset that I didn’t get everything they or I wanted from the negotiations. Well, I wasn’t negotiating with myself! The legislative leaders across the table were also passionate about their beliefs, budgets, and policies, however different they were from mine. Neither of us was going to agree to anything other than a true compromise, where both sides kept but also lost some of what they wanted.

I believe that, as people learn the details of our agreement and compare those results with the initial Republican bills, most will better understand and appreciate how much we gained and how much we saved. I hope that most Minnesotans will come to understand and appreciate that, painful and costly as the shutdown was, it was much less painful and far less costly than not only the loss of $1.5 billion in essential services for this biennium, but also the loss of an additional $1.5 billion for those services in the next biennium, and in the next, and in the next.