Condit-mania was building to a fever pitch. In the dog days of summer, the media’s obsession with the hollow-eyed weasel congressman seemed unavoidable.
What was an intrepid soul to do, especially with Congress and most of the Bush Cabinet out of town, taking a monthlong snooze?
The temperature was in the high 90s, the humidity approaching that of the Amazonian rain forest and the local weathermen in orgiastic frenzy as a “Code Red” air quality alert got them more air time–nearly as much as the training camp exploits of what passes for High Culture here, the Redskins.
It was obvious. There was only one place to seek refuge, avoid the press pack and plant the seeds for a Pulitzer Prize.
Yes, I had to show up at the semiannual meeting of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Airport and Seaport Inspections User Fee Federal Advisory Committee.
It is safe to say that few have ventured to the sixth-floor Shaughnessy Conference Room at INS headquarters, which is found on a forlorn block at 4th and Eye Streets. Perhaps that is partly explained by the first challenge, namely getting into the Shaughnessy Conference Room.
At 12:50 p.m., I walked into INS headquarters and encountered not one, not two, but three armed guards, whose prime release of energy was kibitzing with INS employees on their way to, or returning from, lunch, or a smoke on the oven-like sidewalk outside.
I walked to the kiosk facing me and told the guard that I was going up to the inspections user fee meeting. He told me to check in just around the corner, 40 feet away, at the visitors desk.
There were two more armed guards there, both a tad pasty-faced and showing no signs of having missed a meal in months. The vision of either actually rushing out of the lobby to chase a miscreant, be it bureaucrat or undocumented worker, left me wondering whether there was a defibrillator nearby.
I showed identification, got my visitor badge and retraced my steps. But as I was about to pass the first kiosk, I was informed that I had to wait for yet another INS functionary to escort me the 50 feet to the elevator. It was now several minutes before the 1 p.m. meeting.
With several other folks, who had more bona fide professional reasons to get to the meeting, I cooled my heels for 12 minutes. Finally, a lady arrived to take us those treacherous 50 feet, push the “up” elevator button, then use all her skills to hit the number 6 on the inside panel.
We entered your standard-issue government conference room, which is repainted gray or beige every 10 years. There were 17 people seated at a three-sided table, led by a wide-bodied and dutiful Michael Cronin, the INS executive associate commissioner.
The people were speaking English but it was of scant help to me. I had not a clue what this was about.
A woman from American Airlines asked about some increase in user fees and what the Bush budget would do to the fees. Somebody from the International Air Transport Association asked about fee collection at land wharves.
There was a spirited discussion about inspector staffing. There are 2,960 inspectors on the job but funding for 3,375. An official of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey suggested a committee to mull how to best allocate new hires.
For example, Chicago is authorized to have 135 inspectors but has 105. Meanwhile, Montreal is supposed to have 43 but is down to 33. Honolulu should have 154 but has 136. But that’s better than Prince Rupert, Alaska, which should have two inspectors but is down to zilch.
An official from the “carrier consultant programs office” revealed that his boss was in Bangkok “training trainers” and that there was a recent two-week program in three Brazilian cities, training 250 inspectors for Varig Airlines.
I still had no clue what this was about and whether Dan Rather and Peter Jennings were missing something. And The New York Times has three of everything, so where was their crack INS team?
Finally, for 15 minutes, there was something that I could make sense of: the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Huh?
For about five years, the INS and State Department have huddled about a badge. The result is that, for the first time, the Olympic ID and accreditation card will serve as the visa for 29,000 Olympics athletes, coaches and other foreign nationals.
The INS forensic lab, according to a lady from the INS office of field operations, was intimately involved in creating a badge with 22 forms of ID embedded in it. But only 10 will be known to the airlines bringing the athletes into the country.
I began fighting the Curse of the Heavy Eyelids. If I had not been so properly brought up by my folks, I would have stood up and cried out, like Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” (“Stella!!!”), to the effect, “Where the hell am I???!! What is this?”
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I had stumbled into an unusual federal panel, one whose existence is mandated by statute and stems from the $6 per ticket fee you get stuck with every time you fly internationally or go on many cruises (for political reasons, Caribbean, Mexican and Canadian cruises are exempted).
That money, which in fiscal 2000 amounted to $431 million, goes right to the INS and is now the inevitable centerpiece of discussion within the advisory panel, a potpourri of the transportation industry, including domestic and foreign airlines; cruise lines; airports; port authorities, and aviation industry associations.
The group represents the sort of interaction between government and industry that tends to garner little attention, except when it results in government caving to special interests and taxpayers being fleeced.
This endeavor appears benign, maybe even actually useful, especially given the importance of the INS to the travel industry and all of us. If things are screwed up when you enter the country from a flight or cruise abroad, you fume. If those INS inspection lines bend to the horizon, it has a domino effect, delays the formal release and cleaning of an inbound flight, impedes the entrance by pilots and crew onto outbound flights, and makes life miserable.
There was one lean member with a goatee who kept asking pointed questions. He’s Bob Davidson, an Oregon native who now labors in Montreal for the International Air Transport Association, which boasts 279 member airlines.
He suggested that the committee had not been especially useful for many years, with members given minimal input into how the INS operated. But now there is a “dramatic turnaround” and members have a say about the user fees and allocation of resources, mostly inspectors.
The INS has long been one of the more challenged agencies, notorious for its heavy-handed ways. Davidson, one of the joint panel’s most tenured members, concedes that many congressional criticisms of the INS are on the mark. Due to a mandate to control access to our borders, a mentality has grown that anybody returning to the U.S. must be considered suspect.
It prompts a confrontational mentality, said Davidson, that flies in the face of the fact that “no more than 2 percent of passengers will be of any bona fide interest to the INS.”
To that extent, there are available technologies that would dramatically speed a passenger’s trek out of an airport. They include a system of automated self-clearance, which would use scanners to determine, simply by inspection of your hand, whether you were a suspect creature and could move right along to the customs inspectors. But the INS has instituted the system, known as INSPASS, only in very limited fashion.
“The INS believes its mission is to conduct face-to-face interviews with every person who crosses the border,” Davidson said. “That’s the problem. There are other, better ways to do this.”
There are many other issues confronting this committee:
Should the Carrier Consulting Program training schedule be published on the INS Web site?
What is the timeline for the development of the INSPASS business plan?
Why were the Miami INSPASS machines broken for more than six months?
They were all on my mind as I exited the meeting, made it to the elevator by myself, left the building, rolled my eyes at the oppressive heat and thought only one thought.
Thank god for Gary Condit.