MISQUAH — The recommendation the planning board sent forward on August 25 is for sixteen lots, not eighteen, and it has been for two weeks, and nobody knew until Clerk Donna Skoglund proofread her own minutes against the recording last Wednesday afternoon.

The mechanism is as small as these things always are. Commissioner Lorna Hovde wrote her motion out longhand on a half sheet before the meeting, as she has done since she joined the board. Skoglund typed the conditions from that sheet during the recess and read them back aloud when the chairman asked her to. Where Hovde had written a hurried 18, the loop of the 8 closed short. Skoglund read sixteen. The board voted on what was read aloud. The roll was called on sixteen.

Skoglund found it at about two on Wednesday afternoon, at her own desk with headphones on, doing a job nobody had asked her to do and nobody would have checked. “It is my error and I am not going to spread it around,” she said. “I typed it, I read it, and five people voted on what I read. The handwriting is a contributing factor and not an excuse.” She telephoned Chairman Ross Vig at 2:20, the developer at 2:35, and this newspaper at three. She told the Klatch herself the next morning at half past six, which in this town is the same as filing a public notice.

Hovde, informed that her handwriting was a contributing factor, said she has been hearing about her eights since 1974 and that her mother heard about them first.

Because the board voted on the language as read, the adopted motion is the record. Correcting it would require the board to reconsider and re-adopt — a thing a board may do, and a thing this board declined to do Thursday evening in a special meeting that ran nineteen minutes in front of nineteen people.

Sherry Niskanen, who cast the only no vote on August 25 because she wanted a lower number, moved to let the record stand. “I voted against eighteen,” she said. “I am not going to stand up now and vote to put two lots back on a piece of paper so that I can have the satisfaction of losing correctly. I would rather be right by accident than wrong on purpose.”

Hovde — who moved the eighteen-lot recommendation, and whose handwriting produced the sixteen — voted to let it stand as well. “I said a number and the record says a different number and the record is what five people voted on,” she said. “I am not going to pretend I did not say what everybody heard me not say.”

Curt Ellefson cast the lone no, and his objection was not about lots. “I do not care if it is sixteen or eighteen, I truly do not,” he said. “I care that we found a mistake in our own record and decided to keep it because we liked how it came out. That is the part I cannot vote for. Fix it, and then vote for sixteen if you want sixteen.” Vig, who voted to let it stand, said afterward that Ellefson had the better argument and the worse outcome, and that this happens more than people think.

Kevin Stang of North Pine Land & Homes said Friday the company had spent two days deciding whether it had a grievance and concluded it did not. “Sixteen is workable. Fourteen would not have been,” he said. “I would rather have a clean record with a number I can build than a fight about how the number got there.” The two lots come off the north end; the drawing is being revised this week.

Skoglund has appended a memorandum to the file describing the error and its history, unprompted, and asked that it travel with the file permanently. The recommendation reaches the council October 6 at sixteen lots. Nobody’s handwriting is on the agenda.