6/22 update: Diary of a trip through passport application limbo

Editor’s note: You buy your air ticket and book the hotel for that overseas vacation. Oh no -- your passport is about to expire. With processing delays lasting months, will you get it in time? It can happen to anyone, even the experts. Los Angeles Times Travel Editor Catharine Hamm is caught in Passport Processing Limbo. Here is her diary -- click here to jump to the latest update:

May 9, 2007: I begin working on a column about an 18-year-old traveler whose passport has expired, which she discovers after she has already left the country with her mom, dad and two siblings. She gets sent home from Paris to get a new passport. Yikes. What a bad way to find out. But I know my passport is valid because I was just in Peru in November. What do I have to worry about?

May 9-24: I conduct various interviews with the family, State Department “ target=”_blank”>State Department officials, travel experts and others about the unfortunate traveler. The No. 1 piece of advice: Check to see the expiration date on your passport. I turn in the column May 24.

May 29: I read page proofs of the column before it goes into print. It looks ... OK. But something is wrong.

May 30: Something is bothering me about passports, but I can’t put my finger on it.

June 1: I figure it out: My passport will expire in 18 days. A travel editor without a passport is like Paris Hilton without a party”>Paris Hilton without a party. Oh, the horror. I go to the U.S. Department of State website to figure out what to do next. It tells me I need form DS 82 and new photos.

June 2: I happen by the Mission Viejo library, where they are processing passport applications and taking photos. I don’t have my passport with me — I don’t need one to go to the O.C. — but I do need a picture. I am dressed very casually, which is to stay slovenly. My passport picture shows a smirking middle-aged woman in a baseball jersey and pearls. I look quintessentially American. The flush of my face suggests I also look menopausal.

June 6: I’ve just heard from a reader who sent her passport in on April 5 and still doesn’t have it. Uh-oh. If I want to go to Italy in October, I’d better get cracking. Backlogs are growing.

June 7: The State Department says it will be flexible about the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) regarding passports for travel to Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean. That’s great. But I’m not planning to go to those places. I better get a move on it.

June 8: I get out my Looney Tunes checkbook and write one (picturing Tweety and Sylvester) for $67 to the State Department. I’m not asking for expedited service because I want to see how long this takes. I print out first-class postage with tracking info, paste it on a No. 0 bubble mailer envelope, place my old passport, check, pictures and signed application inside and take it to the Times mailbox downstairs, where, I pray, it soon will be winging its way to Philadelphia”>Philadelphia.

June 11: My envelope is on its way to Philly!

Here’s what my tracking info says about my envelope:

“Status: En route. Your item was processed and left our Swedesboro, NJ 08085 facility on June 11, 2007.”

Philadelphia, here it comes (I hope).

Meanwhile, I get a press release from two U.S. senators’ offices saying this:

“Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)”>Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)”>Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) -- leaders of Senate efforts to fix flaws in plans to implement the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) -- are asking the State and Homeland Security Departments to use the extra time their legislation allows to work out the problems in the border-crossing scheme, before it is implemented....

“Leahy and Stevens, senior members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, last fall pushed through to enactment their legislation giving the two departments up to 17 extra months, until June 1, 2009, to address WHTI’s many problems. The Leahy-Stevens amendment sets out seven requirements that must be certified to Congress before the program can be implemented. So far, the Bush administration has maintained that it will not use and does not need extra time to be ready.”

June 12: The envelope containing my passport application was delivered at 4:54 a.m. today, the Postal Service website, tells me.

A story in tomorrow’s L.A. Times says that some WHTI countries may let you in without a passport but not without a birth certificate, which I also don’t have.

Note to self: Call Onondaga County, N.Y.”>bureau of vital stats in Onondaga County, N.Y., just in case, and pray I don’t have to go to Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean or Bermuda by air any time soon.

June 15: I decided to get brave and look up and see whether my application is actually in the process (www.travel.state.gov and click on (Click Here for Proof of Passport Application.) Here’s what the website said:

“Thank you for submitting your passport application! It is currently being processed.

When you applied, you requested Routine Service.

You should receive your passport within 10-12 weeks from the date you applied. If you are traveling within 2 weeks and have not received your passport, please contact the National Passport Information Center with the above locator number. It will enable them to update you on the status of your application.

Wow. That gives me hope.

But I also had an interview this morning with Colin Walle, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1998, and he tells me the passport backlog is close to 3 million. The good news: The backlog has shrunk in the last couple of weeks. The bad news: The backlog was only 1.3 million in February.

June 18: There seems to be some confusion about how big the backlog of passports actually is. The L.A. Times reported on June 7 (and the Washington Post reported again over the weekend) that the backlog is 500,000. But Colin Walle, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1998, says it is almost six times that many.

If it’s only a half-million, is Congress overreacting by discussing a delay (until June 2009) in implementing the land and sea portion of this initiative (the one that says you have to have a passport even if you’re not flying)? According to USA Today, the Department of Homeland Security opposes the delay.

I’m hearing from some travelers that the link on the State Department’s website that is supposed to show whether you’ve applied (www.travel.state.gov/passport/get/status/status_2567.html) is not working - at least, not for them. If these people are traveling within two weeks, they’re the ones who will have to sit on the phone, try to get an appointment and then go to the passport agency and try to get the mess straightened out.

It’s inconvenient and it’s time consuming. Is that the price we pay for the luxury of travel? Are we too demanding? Or is there cause for complaint?

June 19: Today, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is supposed to meet today to discuss the passport mess. News reports say that the Senate has asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to end the backlog. What, she’s supposed to waive a magic wand and somehow catch up? Let’s get real here. The people who process these passports are, according to Colin Walle, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1998 and himself a passport adjudicator, supposed to process 24 passports an hour. By my math, if there are 500,000 passports in a backlog, it will take 20,833 hours to catch up. Or if one person worked 40 hours a week doing passports, it would take 520 days for him or her to finish the 500,000 (no days off, of course). Obviously, there’s more than one person working on adjudicating passports, but consider that the 500,000 is not the regular workload but the backlog. Oh, and there’s some dispute about that 500,000 number; Walle says it’s closer to 3 million, which would take 125,000 hours to get caught up, or one person 3,125 days to catch up-about 8-1/2 years. Yikes!

June 20: So much news. None with my passport, of course, and I shouldn’t expect any. Last I checked (yesterday) it was still in process, and it’s likely to remain that way for at least 12 weeks. Today’s Los Angeles Times story on the passport debacle chilled me to the bone. In their story, Peter Pae and Molly Hennessey-Fiske paint a vivid picture: 110,000 applications piled in a closet in a Seattle processing center. Government officials acknowledging that they failed to anticipate the crush. And then, this closing of the story:

“On Friday, [Ann] Barrett [deputy assistant secretary of State for passport services] came to the Capitol with Department of Homeland Security officials to brief congressional staffers on the travel initiative’s progress, saying her office was prepared to meet the original January 2008 deadline.

“The staffers laughed.”

And that dispute about numbers of backlogged passports? It seems to have been resolved. In testimony on Tuesday in the Senate, Maura Harty, assistant secretary of State for consular affairs, said the backlog was indeed 3 million. That 500,000 number was the number that had already taken longer than 10 to 12 weeks.

5:20 p.m. update: The passport status site says it is down for maintenance.

LATEST UPDATE

June 21, 7 a.m.: The passport application status site is back up.

The site also says this:

“You must follow these instructions to prove the status of your passport application for those Americans traveling by air to Mexico, Canada or the Caribbean as part of the recently announced Temporary Travel Flexibility for U.S. Citizens with Pending Passport Applications. You must keep a print out of your passport application status for departure from the U.S. and for re-entry into the U.S. Some countries may still require a passport. Please see the Consular Information Sheet on the country you are traveling to for more information.”

When you check through your status, it also tells you this:

“National Passport Information Center

“Contact Information for applications submitted in the U.S. (or its territories) only!

“The toll-free phone number is 1-877-487-2778. For hearing impaired customers, please call TDD/TTY 1-888-874-7793.

“Our hours of operations are 6 a.m. to 12 midnight, Eastern Time, Monday through Friday, excluding Federal Holidays.

“We have limited weekend hours (9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) to assist customers traveling within the next 7 days.”

LATEST UPDATE

June 22: Growing increasingly nervous about not having a birth certificate, I followed the advice offered by a respondent on the Travel section’s Angry Traveler message board. The respondent, ptrsansom, directs readers to his blog, WhirledView. There he recommended using an outfit called www.vitalchek.com, which bills itself as an “express certificate service,” to order a birth certificate. (It also offers death certificates as well as divorce and marriage records.)

I went through the process and just paid $56.95 ($45 for the record, $11.95 processing fee) from Onondaga County, N.Y. If I had gone directly to the N.Y. State bureau of vital stats, it would have cost me $30, but according to the message on the answering machine in the Syracuse office, it also would have taken four to six weeks.

Vitalchek promises delivery in 10 to 14 business days (and for $69.95, I could have had it in five to 10 business days). By my calculation, I should have it, at the latest, by July 19 (accounting for the Fourth of July holiday).

For comparison, I also ordered one for my mother. Hers cost $21 total -- $12 for the certificate, $9 for Vitalchek’s processing fee. Why is it that things in the Midwest are always less expensive than the East or the West?