Gov. Ted Strickland ambushed Dayton when he decided in January to close Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare, and Dayton still is not taking the decision well.

He wants to shutter the 110-bed mental health facility on Wayne Avenue to save money. In the future, patients from the Dayton region will be treated at state facilities in Cincinnati, Columbus or Toledo. The move will mean law enforcement officials will lose time and money ferrying mentally ill defendants to these sites. And mentally ill patients who are not in trouble with the law will be sent farther from home, making it more difficult for their families — who are invariably needed to help keep them stable — to be part of their treatment.

Dayton got no advance notice of the closing, which is bad form, not to mention insulting. Further infuriating the locals, the Ohio Department of Mental Health had no clue that its decision would hurt Wright State University's psychiatric residency program and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base's psychiatric residents. (The state and Twin Valley's patients, incidentally, were benefiting every bit as much as the young doctors from that work.)

This is what happens when people don't have the courage to just come out and tell you what they're going to do to you before they do it.

Now Dayton is paying a price a second time because the governor doesn't want to cut his staff off at the knees and cave to criticism. Moreover, the Greater Dayton Area Hospital Association has been beating up the governor pretty badly, and some of his people are getting sick of it.

But look at it from the locals' point of view: Area hospitals are going to start seeing patients in their emergency rooms that, in the old days, would have gone to Twin Valley. They don't have the space to segregate them; they're worried about security and they know the pressure will be on them to set aside more beds for costly psychiatric patients.

In other words, the governor's cost-cutting move is going to help him, but it's going to cost them.

Ohio House Speaker Jon Husted, of Kettering, is behind an effort to put off the closing for six months and to get more than $6 million set aside for Dayton's loss. The governor may veto those ideas, which would just further alienate everybody and do nothing to help Dayton-area patients.

If everybody would just put down their weapons and think about the patients and their families, a compromise could be worked out. Dayton doesn't have a public hospital, meaning that area hospitals are already eating the costs of a lot of charity care. Asking them to absorb the cost of more psychiatric care, too — when other areas of the state aren't being required to do the same — is ridiculous.

Absolutely, the governor has a budget problem, but he is letting the mental health department make its cuts on the backs of people in Dayton.

Dayton put out an over-the-top request for more than $20 million as a financial offset. That request went nowhere, but there is at least sentiment in the House and Senate for giving Dayton some money for a "crisis care" center — a facility that would fall short of a full-fledged Twin Valley. You'd think the governor would see that as a statement of trying to make the best of a raw deal, an act of good faith.

At this point, getting all hung up about who's more wrong, or who has been most wronged, is losing perspective. The discussion needs to be about minimizing how much mentally ill people are hurt — not how bruised the governor is or the hospitals will be.

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