MISQUAH — The City Council voted 4–1 Monday night to form a subcommittee charged with staffing the stop-sign subcommittee it referred the matter to last month — a subcommittee that has, in the intervening weeks, failed to acquire a fourth member, a chair, or a single meeting. The new body’s sole assignment is to find people to sit on the old body, a task the old body could not perform on the grounds that it did not yet exist.

The vote is the latest motion in a proceeding that predates everyone now seated at the council table. The intersection of Birch and Second has held three stop signs and one bare metal post since 1957, when, by the surviving accounts, a fourth sign was ordered, delivered, set aside “until spring,” and never seen again. The post has stood empty every summer since, making it, this June, sixty-nine years old and the most studied piece of municipal hardware in the county. Old-timers can tell you, and will, exactly where the original sign was last seen leaning, which was against the side of the old Co-op creamery, which has itself stood empty since 1987 — a pile-up of unfinished business on a single block that residents have stopped finding remarkable.

Three of the four new seats are spoken for. Alderman Pete Hagen will serve, as the measure’s author. Clerk Donna Skoglund will serve, “so the minutes exist,” a service she has now performed for the sign across four separate committees and three decades. Mayor Gloria Vik will serve ex officio, “to keep it moving,” a phrase she conceded “may be optimistic.” The fourth seat — the one the new subcommittee exists to fill — remains, fittingly, open.

Alderman Lloyd Bunde cast the lone no vote and again declined to serve, as he has declined every committee touching the sign since 2011. “I’m not against a stop sign,” Bunde clarified, as he clarifies annually. “I’m against pretending a committee is how you put one up. You put one up with a post-hole digger and an afternoon. We already have the post. We have had the post since Eisenhower. What we are missing is not a study. What we are missing is a Saturday and a man willing to dig.” A replacement sign, Skoglund confirmed, would cost the city about two hundred dollars — a figure that has appeared in the minutes, unactioned, several times, and that has not meaningfully changed except to rise with the price of steel.

Mayor Vik, asked whether the sign might go up this year, gave the answer she gives. “There is no rush,” she said. “The post isn’t going anywhere.” The new subcommittee will meet, she added, “once it has someone to call the meeting” — a condition the council did not resolve Monday, and referred, in effect, to itself. The intersection, for its part, has functioned without incident for sixty-nine years on the strength of three signs and the universal local understanding that the fourth direction stops anyway, out of habit, and out of respect for a debate older than most of the people having it.