Locals Pay Feds To Shorten Border Wait Times
To speed up wait times at the nation's ports of entry, some border communities have decided to pay the federal government.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced a new pilot program Friday in which the agency will partner with local communities to better staff and equip international crossings.
Citing federal cutbacks, CBP says it doesn't have sufficient funding to hire more customs officers or pay them overtime. In border cities like El Paso, Texas, that means commuters and commercial vehicles can wait for hours to cross the international bridges. In response, the city offered to pay up to $3 million that would go toward the staffing costs of customs officers.
But before March of this year, the federal government was not authorized to receive money from the city. Other entities, like a non-profit in south Texas and a group of investors in Tijuana, had offered CBP money for similar projects.
In March, Congress passed the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act that includes a section allowing for CBP to enter into five of these so called "public/private partnerships." Under the partnership local entities would reimburse CBP for additional services, like overtime pay.
Friday CBP revealed the groups it will be partnering with: the city of El Paso, Miami-Dade County, South Texas Assets Consortium, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, and Houston Airport System.
A spokeswoman for DFW airport said the partnership will reduce wait times for travelers arriving on international flights. She said the airport will pick up the tab for up to $3 million in overtime for customs officers.
El Paso Congressman Beto O'Rourke, a Democrat, has been a strong supporter of these new partnerships. The city of El Paso would raise the money to fund officer overtime by increasing tolls at its border crossings.
"El Paso has a critical dependence on our international ports of entry," O'Rourke said. "There are more than 100,000 jobs just in our community that depend on cross-border trade and retail activity that is generated by those bridges."
Overall trade across the southern border has quintupled in the past 20 years. More than a billion dollars in goods crosses the southern border daily.
A spokesman for CBP in Washington said President Obama has already requested congressional approval to extend these partnerships in 2014.
