MISQUAH — The city has moved this month’s dock-permit hearings from the council room to the fire hall, Clerk Donna Skoglund confirmed, in anticipation of a crowd — attendance being “expected to exceed six,” which is more chairs than the council room can reliably guarantee, and therefore, by the town’s practical arithmetic, a different building.

The hearings concern a handful of shoreline dock and lift permits along Big Pelican, ordinarily a sleepy matter that draws the applicants and no one else. This season’s docket, however, includes a contested application near a swimming area and a question of setback that has, in Skoglund’s words, “gotten people interested who are not normally interested, which is how you know to move it to the fire hall and make more coffee.”

The council room, a small space that has hosted the city’s business for decades, seats comfortably about the number of people who usually attend, which is to say very few. “It’s a fine room for a normal night,” Skoglund said. “It is not a fine room for a night when the shoreline’s involved. Shoreline brings them out. You can table a stop sign for sixty-nine years and nobody blinks, but you put a dock eight feet too close to somebody’s swimming and suddenly it’s standing room.”

The hearings will be held at the fire hall at 7 p.m., with the dock applications taken in order and public comment invited, briefly, the clerk hopes. Written comment may be submitted in advance to her office, where it will be read in full — “all of it,” she said, “including the parts about the neighbor, which I will read silently and not enter into the record, as is my long custom.”