MISQUAH — 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.

Which leaves tonight. At 7 p.m. at the city hall, the planning board takes up the proposed eighteen-lot development on the forty-one acres of the old Hagen pasture — the largest housing proposal in a generation, and the most genuinely divisive question the town has faced since the last one. Alderman Pete Hagen, whose late uncle owned the land, remains recused, as he has since the proposal surfaced this spring.

The argument, stripped of its politeness, is this: the town says it wants young families, and young families require houses, and houses require building on land that is presently a pasture with a view. Those who want the families and those who want the view are, in many cases, the same people, at different hours of the day. It is not a fight between good and bad neighbors. It is a fight inside a lot of good neighbors, which is the harder kind.

The board will hear public comment, and the chairs — as our photographer found this week — have already been set out early, extra ones along the wall. No vote is expected tonight; the board will take the matter under advisement, which in Misquah is understood to mean genuinely. This newspaper will report fully next week. Until then, we would only remind everyone attending that they will all still need to see each other at the Daybreak on Wednesday morning, and to comport themselves accordingly.