MISQUAH — With two weeks until the written-comment window closes, the Hagen pasture file stands at thirty-eight comments — up seven since the count was last taken — and Clerk Donna Skoglund reports the late arrivals are not getting shorter. “The first wave was letters,” she said. “The second wave is essays. The current wave is essays with appendices. Someone cited a book this week. I checked — it’s a real book.”

Comment remains open through Tuesday, August 18, in writing, at the clerk’s window, ahead of the planning board’s special meeting on Tuesday, August 25, at 7 p.m., where the board will settle on its recommendation to the council regarding the eighteen proposed lots. Chairman Ross Vig is reported to be reading everything twice, per his standing method, and to have said nothing new, per his standing method.

The file itself, promoted last month to its own drawer, is now one folder from requiring a second, which would bring the matter’s total footprint to a drawer and a half and prompt what Skoglund calls “a furniture conversation I am not ready to have.” The stop-sign subcommittee, whose own file has occupied a corner of the same cabinet since 1957 by way of its predecessors, was asked whether it felt upstaged by the pasture’s pace. The subcommittee, through a member who asked not to be named, replied that the sign “isn’t in a hurry,” and that files, like the matters they contain, “settle at their own speed.” The sign’s installation remains planned for October. The pasture’s answer, at least the board’s share of it, is due in three weeks.