The worst way to resolve a complicated public policy dispute is with a referendum.

It’s not that voters aren’t smart enough to understand the issues – it’s that most of these questions don’t lend themselves to simple yes-or-no answers.

There are usually multiple factors in play, and every step forward comes with a cost. Since the questions are drafted by one side, they are naturally one-sided.

You would get much better results by pushing these ideas through a legislative process where representatives of various interests could hammer out compromises that, hopefully, most people could live with.

But there’s a problem. Referendums aren’t just the worst way to resolve complicated issues: In Maine, they have become the only way.

That’s why we see five of them on our ballot this year, asking us to legalize recreational marijuana, tax high incomes to raise money for schools, mandate background checks for private gun sales, increase the minimum wage and reform the way elections are conducted.

Any of these would have been the biggest thing to come out of the last Legislature if they had, in fact, come out of the last Legislature. But all of them will be decided, up or down, on Election Day.

Augusta is just not delivering, and some would argue that’s a good thing. Dysfunction is a necessary check on an expanding government, they claim, and not passing laws on these issues shows admirable restraint.

That sounds good, but it ignores a basic fact. “Nothing” can’t happen; you always end up with “something.” Not doing your job doesn’t mean it won’t get done – it just means someone else will do it.

The classic example of what’s gone wrong at the State House is the solar power bill that almost passed in June.

It started in 2015 when a bill to expand “net metering,” the system used to compensate the owners of solar panels for the electricity that they feed onto the grid on sunny days. The bill ran into opposition from transmission utilities and Public Advocate Tim Schneider – the official representing ratepayer interests at the Public Utilities Commission – who said that expanding solar under those terms would unfairly shift costs onto other electricity customers.

Instead of passing the bill, the Legislature created a task force that included Schneider and Central Maine Power along with solar installers and environmental groups. They met for a year and put forward a proposal that all of them could live with.

It would have provided potential solar customers with predictable income to offset the cost of their investment, which would stimulate business installing and maintaining solar panels. The measure also would have aggregated all the solar power produced in the state so the PUC could sell renewable-energy credits to polluters, using the income to benefit all ratepayers, whether they use solar or not.

The bill was submitted to the Legislature, amended in committee and passed with bipartisan support in both the House and Senate.

But then it was vetoed by LePage, and he put pressure on Republican lawmakers. A proposal to override the veto came within two votes of passing in the House. In a desperate second vote, Republican lawmakers who had previously supported the bill “took a walk” and let the bill fall short for the last time, wasting a year’s work.

Some argue that was the right outcome. They say the solar bill would have committed the state to buy too much power at too high a price. Even after the compromise, costs would have been shifted to other consumers.

But that’s not the point. The value of the bill may be a matter of dispute, but there is one thing you can’t dispute. If environmental groups decide to put a solar bill out to referendum, it won’t be a compromise, and all of the critics’ problems with the bill LePage vetoed would be even more significant.

And why shouldn’t solar advocates writes such a question? They put in a year of work on legislation that would have gotten them only part of the way to their goal. They compromised, even though they believed that they were 100 percent right, because compromise is the price of progress in our system of government.

But all that work came to nothing, not because they couldn’t convince the majority of lawmakers that they were right, but because the governor and a handful of members of the House leadership were able to get enough lawmakers to “take a walk” at just the right moment.

The lesson of the solar bill will be hard to avoid this Election Day. If any of the ballot questions pass – and all have at least modest leads in the early polls – it will be clear how to most effectively make change.

If you want to do something big, don’t waste your time in the Legislature.

Because the “worst way” to make public policy is becoming the only way to get it done.

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