MISQUAH — The corner of Birch Street and Second Avenue will keep its three stop signs and one bare post for at least another month, after the City Council voted 4–1 Monday night to refer the question of a fourth sign to a subcommittee that does not, at present, exist.

It was the third straight meeting at which the matter has been tabled. By the count of City Clerk Donna Skoglund, who has kept the council’s minutes since 1994, it was “the eleventh time overall, give or take, depending on whether you count the stretch in the eighties when we just let it ride.”

The intersection, where two residential streets meet on the east side of town, has operated with three stop signs since 1957. The fourth corner — the southeast one, in front of the late Einar Erickson’s mailbox — has never had a sign, and by long habit drivers stop there anyway, a custom Skoglund recorded in the minutes as “self-enforcing, mostly.”

The proposal came, as it has before, from Alderman Pete Hagen, who estimates he has raised it “every couple of years since about 2009.” His case, he said, is simple. “You’ve got three signs and an empty post just standing there,” Hagen said before the meeting. “It’s not symmetrical. It bothers a person. A sign is forty dollars. We’ve spent more than that in coffee arguing about it.” The county highway department put the actual cost, with post and labor, at roughly $340.

Alderman Lloyd Bunde led the opposition. “The corner works,” Bunde told the council. “Nobody’s been hit there since the Pearson boy clipped the hay wagon in ’71, and that was the wagon’s fault. You start adding signs nobody asked for, pretty soon you’ve got a study, and a consultant, and a fella from the Cities telling us what our own corner needs.”

Mayor Gloria Vik urged the council not to hurry. “This has waited sixty-nine years,” she said. “It can wait until we’ve looked at it properly. The post isn’t going anywhere.” Vik moved to send the question to the Public Safety Subcommittee, at which point Skoglund noted the subcommittee had been dissolved in 2019, when its last remaining member moved to Brainerd to be nearer his daughter.

The council then voted to form a new subcommittee to study the matter and report back. Bunde cast the lone dissent. “Forming a subcommittee to decide whether to put up a sign,” he said afterward, “is exactly the kind of thing they do down at the lake.”

Appointments are expected at the next meeting, and a public hearing on the proposed sign has been set for 7 p.m. July 14 at City Hall, where residents may comment, or — as many have over the decades — decline to. In other business, the council accepted a donation of forty-one folding chairs from the VFW, thirty-eight of which fold, and approved the seasonal opening of the public landing. The meeting adjourned at 8:12 p.m.