Lucinda Jesson, a law professor and health law specialist, arrived at the helm of the Minnesota Department of Human Services in 2011 with an imperative to rein in the rapidly rising cost of state-purchased health care services for the poor and disabled. That she did, pushing through "we've always done it that way" resistance within the department to create a new, competitive-bid purchasing policy with the state's health plans and care providers.

The result, according to a departmental fiscal analysis, has been a cool $1.06 billion in savings to state taxpayers over four years. The projected annual increase in state spending on managed care dropped from 6-7 percent to 2 percent, DHS Deputy Commissioner Chuck Johnson said, with no change in eligibility or benefits for the vulnerable population served.

That kind of performance warrants compensation that is at least fair and reasonably reflective of the marketplace. But until a law change in 2013, the salaries of state agency heads were limited by the pay of the governor, which was frozen at $120,303 for 15 years. Agency heads didn't see a pay raise from 2000 until 2013, and then it was only from $108,400 to $113,800.

They've seen one now, and DFL Gov. Mark Dayton's GOP critics are crying foul. Last month, Dayton took advantage of the authority granted by the 2013 change to make a one-time catch-up adjustment in his commissioners' salaries. In some cases, annual pay jumped $35,000. The biggest boost was for the Metropolitan Council chair — from $58,489 to $144,991 — because his position changed from part-time to full-time.

Those are numbers with which political hay can be made — especially when they are cited free of context. But in this case, context matters, and fair-minded Minnesotans will do well to take note of it before passing judgment on the salary increases Republican legislators decry. When they do, we think they will find the increases justified.

Before this year's increases, Minnesota's state agency heads were paid considerably less than a majority of their peers in Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Washington and North Dakota, according to data from selected states the Dayton administration supplied to legislators. After her raise, Jesson will still be paid less than her counterparts in three of those states. Her pay will still be limited by the governor's salary, but can be as much as 133 percent of that amount, not the previous 95 percent. The 2013 law that authorized those changes also provided for annual cost-of-living adjustments in the governor's salary through 2016.

In a three-page letter to legislators Monday, Dayton cited Jesson's cost-saving changes in health care purchasing as one example of the difference top executive leadership can make. He noted that she heads a staff of 6,500 employees and a combined federal-state annual budget of $35 billion. "Outstanding executive leadership is worth much more than it costs," the governor said.

At a House Ways and Means Committee meeting on Monday, Republican legislators countered by noting that through the past four years, Dayton recruited and retained able people to head state agencies at their former salaries, all below his own. But Dayton attests that recruiting wasn't easy and that retaining is getting harder. The state just lost a trusted Minnesota Management and Budget commissioner to the private sector. Without the catch-up adjustments Dayton just made, the next governor's recruitment task would be harder still.

The GOP-led Ways and Means Committee advanced a bill that would reduce stopgap funding authorization for three state agencies, including the DHS, by a sum equal to six months of the agency heads' new salaries. That likely would not reduce those salaries, but another GOP bill could lead to a downward adjustment. It would rescind the 2013 law change that allowed the governor more authority over agency head salaries.

We look for that bill to gallop through the GOP-controlled House, come to a dead stop in the DFL-controlled Senate and emerge again in 2016 legislative campaign literature. By then, we hope Minnesotans will have taken a longer look at state salaries and will have considered whether they want the state services on which so much depends to be led on the cheap.