White House Decision May Bring Relief To Houston Passport Office, One Of The Nation's Busiest

HOUSTON (AP) _ The Bush administration's decision to relax passport requirements should bring some relief to travelers at one of the nation's busiest passport offices, where lines form as early

Friday, June 8th 2007, 5:13 pm

By: News On 6

HOUSTON (AP) _ The Bush administration's decision to relax passport requirements should bring some relief to travelers at one of the nation's busiest passport offices, where lines form as early as 2 a.m. and extra workers have been brought in to process documents.

Even as the White House made the announcement, about 100 people stood in a line Friday that snaked around Houston's federal building as temperatures rose into the mid-90s before noon.

Daniel Harrison left his home in Keller, near Dallas, at 1 a.m. Friday to get in line in Houston by 5:30 a.m. in hopes of picking up his children's passports for a vacation to Greece.

``I need these passports by the time I leave today because my flight is Tuesday at 6 a.m., and they can't guarantee that they can expedite it and Fed Ex it to me in time to make my flight. So here I stand. It's very, very frustrating,'' Harrison said.

The summer travel season _ combined with a new rule requiring a passport for travelers going to Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and the Caribbean _ caused the processing time for passport requests to quadruple to nearly four months.

But the Bush administration announced Friday that it would temporarily ease the restriction so that a passport was not required as long as travelers could prove they had applied for one.

Jacqueline Harley-Bell, regional director of the Houston Passport Agency, said a team of 20 passport specialists arrived at the office last month to help the 12 employees process the crush of applications. That resulted in a 20 percent reduction in the backlog in the last couple of weeks.

But Harley-Bell worried the long lines would form again in January, when passports will be required for all land border crossings in the United States.

Many residents along the Texas-Mexico border make frequent trips across the boundary, meaning hundreds of thousands of people who did not have passports will soon need one. The new rule also covers the Canadian border as well as ocean trips to Caribbean islands.

``We're in the process of hiring additional staff,'' Harley-Bell said. ``So we're hoping that by January, when the next flood starts, we will have doubled our staff that we currently have on board so we can handle this surge.''

Democratic Rep. Gene Green said the Houston Passport Agency is going to need a lot more help.

``If they think this is a problem, welcome to Texas because we have people who drive to Mexico many times during the year, and they will have to get passports not only for them but for their whole families,'' said Green, who represents a heavily Mexican-American section of Houston with frequent border crossers.