MISQUAH — The planning board’s recommendation on the Hagen pasture — the eighteen proposed lots the whole town spent July discussing — will come at a special meeting on Tuesday, August 25, at 7 p.m. at city hall, the board announced this week. The formal notice appears in this edition’s Public Notices; the informal notice appeared at the Daybreak within eleven minutes of the courthouse posting.

Chairman Ross Vig said the board had spent the two weeks since the hearing “reading everything twice,” including the forty spoken comments and the thirty-one written ones, several of which he described as “essays, with citations.” Written comment remains open through Tuesday, August 18, and may be left with Clerk Donna Skoglund, who confirms the Hagen file has now graduated to its own drawer.

The board’s recommendation goes to the council, which is not bound by it but has historically treated the planning board the way you treat a relative who is right at an annoying rate. Ald. Pete Hagen remains recused; Ald. Lloyd Bunde remains unrecused and, by his own account, “undecided in a new direction most days.”

Asked whether the August meeting would settle the matter, Vig chose his words with the care of a man setting a full coffee cup on a boat. “It will settle what the board thinks,” he said. “I have learned not to promise further than that.” The room will be the same one as July’s hearing. The city has not borrowed additional chairs, which observers are free to read as either confidence or a dare.