Leading up to the vote by the Missoula County Board of Health that unanimously passed the mandatory masking ordinance, County Public Information Officer Mary Parrish went through the thousands of comments from the public regarding the subject.

“For the city, when we looked at folks that submitted comments during this two week period, there are 1,664 comments in that time period from city residents,” said Parrish. “Of those, 1,345 were in favor of, and 206 were opposed.”

Parrish then counted down the comments from Missoula County residents.

“We had 656 county residents, of which 397 were proponents and 194 were opposed,” she said. “So I did the same thing and if we just look at those 591 people who submitted either a yea or a nay, we see that 67 percent of county residents were proponents of the proposal and 33 percent were opposed.”

Parrish then took all the numbers and compiled the statistics from the comment period.

“Now, we’ll just compile that data together so that you can get a full picture of all city and all county residents that commented,” she said. “Together, we have 2,142. 81 percent were proponents and 19 percent were opposed.”

Parrish said the number of comments overwhelmed the mailboxes of county employees so a special portal for public comment was created. Thousands of comments were phoned, emailed or mailed in to the health department concerning the ordinance.

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