The Misquah Pilot-Independent

The planning board heard the town out Tuesday night, and the town, it turns out, had a good deal to say. The public hearing on the proposed eighteen-lot development on the old Hagen pasture ran two and a half hours, drew the largest crowd the city hall has held since anyone started counting, and ended precisely the way the board said it would: with no vote, no decision, and the whole forty-one acres taken under advisement.

The room filled by a quarter to seven. The extra chairs set out along the wall — photographed by this newspaper the week prior, in what now looks like understatement — were gone by ten of, and Clerk Donna Skoglund was seen carrying in the folding chairs from the fire hall, which is technically a loan and will technically be returned. Late arrivals stood three deep at the back, and the coffee urn, pressed beyond its design capacity, was retired empty before the first speaker finished.

Forty people spoke. The count is exact, because Mrs. Skoglund kept the sign-up sheet, and this newspaper has learned not to round numbers in this town. They spoke for the houses, and against them, and — in what became the evening’s honest pattern — frequently both, sometimes within the same three minutes. A man who described the pasture view as “the reason I never left” closed by saying his son commutes forty minutes from Two Rivers because there is nothing here to buy. A woman who spoke in favor of the lots asked, on her way back to her seat, whether the fence line at least might be kept. Nobody in the room appeared to find any of this contradictory, because nobody in this town is.