Public Concerns Public concerns are a means of organizing information from public comment in a condensed format to facilitate identification of a range of public concerns and the reporting out of these concerns over the course of the comment period. Public comment analysis considers all information. All public comment is initially considered substantive until determined otherwise by interdisciplinary team members or the decision maker. Public concerns are pulled from the information in public comment.
Concerns try to capture the question or problem identified by the public.
However, grouping questions and problems is important in order to avoid an overly extensive list of public concerns and to reduce redundancy where possible. Many times, the information in different public comments touches on similar themes. The overarching public question or problem can be made into a concern and variations on that question or problem can be included in examples after the concern. This means that each public concern is followed by verbatim samples of information from public comment. These sample statements illustrate the concern.