The Misquah Pilot-Independent

The City Council spent its July 7 meeting settling the questions it could settle and leaving the hard one for tonight. In a single evening the body granted the brewery a license, deferred the Birch-and-Second stop sign to October, and declined to do anything at all about a stain — a productive night, by the standards of a town that measures progress in decades.

The license for the taproom Annika and Jonas Holt intend to open in the old Co-op creamery passed without drama and, as predicted, without opposition — including, notably, none from the Northern Tap. The council spent a dutiful three-quarters of an hour on parking, hours, and the question of whether anything good has ever come of change, and then approved the thing anyway, which observers had penciled in as the outcome before the first gavel.

The stop sign at Birch and Second, petitioned for since 1957, was deferred to October by the unanimous prediction of everyone who has ever watched the council watch the stop sign. Its own public hearing, once noticed for tonight, was quietly vacated — tonight belongs to the pasture. “It’s waited sixty-nine years,” Mayor Gloria Vik observed. “It can wait until the weather turns.” Longtime observers are declining to believe in an October sign until one is standing in the ground.