define because many factors are involved in the suitability assessment, and no one site can be expected to be superior in all respects. In any event, the Siting Commission was required only to identify certifiable sites—although, as shown in later chapters of this report, the expectations of some affected communities with regard to a "best" site created problems for the Siting Commission as siting progressed.

Second, through the implementation of the exclusionary and preference criteria, the Siting Commission divided the site selection process into an exclusionary phase, during which the commission was removing land from consideration, and a selection phase, during which the commission actively sought to identify certifiable sites from ever-smaller areas of the state. The differences between these two activities had important implications for the commission's work. The exclusionary steps, which were largely in the beginning of the process (particularly SES and the early stages of CAI; see Chapters 4 and 5), were not controversial because of their very nature. Because they excluded large regions of the state, the results of exclusionary screening were welcomed by citizens in excluded areas. By comparison, the process of selecting candidate areas and potential sites has the potential to be more visible because it focused public scrutiny on relatively small areas, and the result—being selected—was cause for concern among affected communities. In fact, as noted in Chapters 5 and 6, public interest did not become significant until the later inclusionary phases of the screening process.

By choosing a two-stage process the Siting Commission automatically, if inadvertently, heightened public scrutiny during the later stages of the screening process—where, as discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, the data were frequently mismatched to the scale of screening and the screening methodology became increasingly subjective. As later chapters show, the Siting Commission's progress slowed significantly as its focus changed from exclusion to selection. It is not clear that the commission appropriately recognized this shift of emphasis. Moreover, as far as the committee could judge, the commission failed to understand the implications of the change in emphasis from exclusion of land to selection of sites.