Public hearings and meeting records represent vast sources of information difficult to organize and analyze. The purpose of this chapter is to describe and establish the participants’ basic information and their comments. In this research, I focus to organize, quantify and classify the stakeholders and their comments of public participation in Kentucky, Puerto Rico and Texas for the construction of highway or related infrastructure in cave and karst systems. Results per case include number of attendees, commenters, and 42 roles of the citizen. A total of 486 comments were read, classified and analyzed using NVivo 9 software to identify word frequency. In addition, I identified patterns in the public comment of each meeting and hearing with the Glaser classical approach of Grounded Theory methodology. This leaded to a depth analysis with the emergence of patterns and core variables leaded by a theory grounded in the data of participants’ comments. The NVivo analysis resulted in three different word clouds constructed by the 100 most frequent words. In contrast, the Grounded Theory approach showed that regardless of the time, place, and commenters, the central concerns summarized patterns that revolved around the capacity to negotiate valuable aspects of an issue and for the agency the chance to comply with the legal requirements of public hearings.
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