With spring break approaching and many students planning to vacation out of the country, there has been an influx of passport applications at the post office in the Student Union. Alisa Porch, sales associate at the campus post office, said more students are applying for a passport at this time of the year. She said the office gets busier with applications in April and May as summer vacations approach. “There are more people applying now because of spring break,” Porch said. A change to federal passport regulations in February required anyone traveling by air to Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean or Bermuda to have a passport. This change, part of an effort to combat terrorism, caused a backlog in passport applications during the summer and overwhelmed the U.S. State Department. The State Department’s figures reported 3 million applications were pending in July and that there was a 33 percent increase in the number of passports processed in the same period as the year before. The backlog was so bad this summer that Congress delayed the new border passport rule, which will not go into effect until June 1, 2009. The department hired a reserve of workers to process the expected influx of applications this year. The Passport Backlog Reduction Act allows the State Department to hire retired former staffers trained to process passport applications, according to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Web site The act waived requirements that denied retirement benefits to workers who exceed certain wages or hours worked. Jeremy Joiner, Honors College academic adviser, coordinated the Gateway to China summer program for the past two years. He asked students going to China with him this summer to apply for a passport now to be ready for the trip in May. “It is always advised to apply for a passport as soon as possible as one knows he is going out of the country,” Joiner said. “The longer one waits into the spring or summer, the more bogged-down the passport processing offices will be.” Rachel Versnel, international trade and finance freshman, had trouble receiving her passport in time for the Gateway to China trip this past summer. She needed to use her birth certificate and therefore could not mail it to the passport office with her application. Her parents hired a law office in Washington, D.C., to expedite her passport. Versnel had only two weeks until the deadline to turn in her passport to apply for a visa. Because the passport office was overwhelmed with backlogged passports, she would have been required to wait at least four weeks. The law office had her passport sent to her in just one week. Porch said many students are applying for expedited service. Joiner said expedited service would return a passport in two weeks two years ago. Now, expedited service usually takes at least four to six weeks. The regular passport application fee costs $97, and the cost for expedited service is an additional $60. Joiner said when he applied for an expedited passport, it was misdirected and arrived a week late. “Most students who apply for a passport apply for expedited [service], and it comes back pretty quickly,” Joiner said. Joiner said those who are in a rush can go to the passport agency in New Orleans. He said it is often possible to get a passport in one day there, but it might mean waiting the entire day. The Union post office accepts passport applications from 9 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. Porch said the least busy time to apply for a passport is at 9 a.m. when the office first opens. Joiner also recommends checking the travel requirements for each individual country. Some countries require a visa. But, information on the passport is required to apply for a visa, so it is important to start the process early. Some countries also recommend immunizations. The Center for Disease Control’s Web site has a vaccination list for each country.
—-Contact Emily Holden at [email protected]