This proposed action has the potential to cause extensive impacts to those laboratories and organizations which are either non-profit or volunteer. University laboratories and citizen monitoring groups come to mind as examples of these. The definite impacts will be fiscal, not merely in the fees required and purchase of certifying standards, but also in the additional staff resources that will be required to implement the program. Other commenters have spoken about the confusion for state university laboratories because their status could be interpreted as being both commercial and non-commercial (does this mean they get certified twice?) depending upon whether they are doing work directly for DEQ or indirectly via a subcontract to a commercial entity. There are additional educational requirements for commercial labs, so does this mean state university laboratories that do commercial work as subcontractors need to implement those along with any additional expenses that entails? Furthermore, if a state university laboratory does work for the DEQ under a contract, does this mean that the DEQ pays the university laboratory to obtain the certification by paying a fee to the DEQ from those DEQ-contracted funds?

At minimum, then, the comment period on this needs to be extended, and some thoughful modifications need to be made based on the comments received. If these issues were pointed out by any university and volunteer organization members who were members of the advisory committee, it would be good to know what logic was used to issue the proposed regulation in this form. Or, perhaps, these issues were never raised, in which case I would posit that proper representation on the committee from these constituencies was missing. If, indeed, there were representatives from these constituencies, and these issues were never raised, then I submit for consideration that the representatives were inadequately familiar with how non-profit laboratories operate.

Definitely needs a re-do!