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Bottleneck at the border


No relief in sight for longer lines
By Diane Lindquist
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
August 30, 2006

After a recent Baja California surf outing, Michael Fox and his buddies were inching in their SUV toward the San Ysidro port of entry inspection booths.

They'd already spent an hour in the line of vehicles and estimated it would be another hour before they would clear the gate to proceed home to La Jolla. When they drove across the border the previous Sunday, the wait took even longer.
“This is ridiculous,” Fox said. “It takes three seconds to get into Mexico and three hours to get out.”

Although no official statistics track delays at the border, people who cross say they are waiting longer this unusually hot summer, and border officials agree. While U.S. Customs and Border Protection says it is doing all it can to move people along swiftly, the reality is improvement might not occur until the San Ysidro port of entry is expanded and a third border crossing opens. That is years away.

Frustration is growing not only for those who wait in line, but also for tourism and business officials.

“It's common sense that the people who go back and forth generate economic growth,” said Alejandro Rivera, executive director of Tijuana's Economic Development Corp. “The sad part is that some other regions will gain development and not ours.”

Some San Diegans are vowing to never visit Baja California again. Even during non-rush hours, the wait can be unbearable. At midmorning one recent weekday, honking cars stretched from the border more than a mile into the Tijuana River Valley, beyond the city's cultural center, clogging a traffic circle where police officers attempted to separate regular traffic from that queueing for the border.

Tijuana resident Bruno Sánchez, who has a permit to work in the United States, said he gets up at 3 a.m. each day to arrive by 7 a.m. at his job as a parking attendant in a downtown San Diego high-rise.
“If I don't get in line by 4:30, I don't get here on time,” he said.

Pedestrians at both San Ysidro and Otay Mesa often have waits of more than an hour, longer than in years past. And special privileges that once let bike riders and the disabled move to the head of the line have been eliminated, prompting more complaints.

The bottleneck of cargo trucks at the Otay Mesa commercial crossing also has grown longer. The average wait is three to five hours and sometimes more, said Juan González, a driver for G&S Express trucking, who recently was ferrying a load of fresh-picked produce across the border.

“There's been a big growth,” he said. “There's a lot more work in the maquiladoras. They're at peak production.”

Commercial traffic has mushroomed 14 percent in the last year, according to government statistics. The number of trucks crossing at Otay Mesa totals about 2,000 a day, at a rate of 140 per hour during the hours when it is open.

In all, more than 166,000 people enter the United States daily at Otay Mesa and San Ysidro – 16 percent more than five years ago.

A 2002 San Diego Association of Governments report estimates that the crush of people and vehicles traveling between San Diego and Tijuana will more than double by 2020.

The only possibility of a relatively swift border passage are the special fast-pass SENTRI lanes for passenger vehicles and FAST lanes for cargo trucks. Vehicles enrolled in the SENTRI program normally pass through the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa port of entries in fewer than 15 minutes.

But there are formidable challenges to enroll in those programs, which require fees and extensive background checks.

One Customs and Border Protection agent said new SENTRI applicants are waiting a year and a half to get approved. An agency spokesman offered no timeline but said applicants are being scheduled into next year.

Many frequent commuters from Tijuana can't afford the $129 to enroll. “Truthfully,” said parking attendant Sánchez, “sometimes I don't even have enough money to come to work.”

Under the FAST program, space for trucks to queue up on the Mexican side of the border has become limited, federal officials said. Customs and Border Protection is adding two additional inspection booths to process more trucks in the program, but they won't be completed until next summer.


More screening, traffic
Traffic at the ports of entry is “at the highest levels I've ever seen in the community,” said Adele Fasano, who oversees Customs and Border Protection operations in San Diego.
Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff has identified the San Ysidro port of entry as a high-threat area for the smuggling of contraband and the possible entry of terrorists, she said. That requires greater effort with the same number of agents.

“More officers are prescreening,” Fasano said. “There's more screening of individuals both in the passenger car and pedestrian lanes.”

Agents now are supposed to request identification documents of all individuals as well as car registrations, she said.

“The capacity of the ports is simply not sufficient to handle the traffic,” Fasano said. “We are doing everything we can with our existing resources. . . . We're trying everything we can.”

According to SANDAG, the congestion at the commercial, vehicle and pedestrian border crossings is taking a heavy toll on the regional economy.

A recent study for the quasi-public agency said San Diego and Tijuana suffer annual losses of more than $8 billion a year due to missed connections or people simply getting fed up and not crossing. The number of additional jobs that could be created if traffic flowed smoothly runs to 83,000, according to the study.

“We're missing a lot of opportunities. People don't want to put up with the hassles,” said SANDAG executive director Gary Gallegos.

Ruben Romero, a Tijuana software developer who was in the passenger vehicle line recently, said he crosses once or twice a week to buy supplies.

“I don't like to cross. I only do it because I need to do things for my business,” he said. “Every time it gets slower and slower.”


Unclogging a lifeline
Many hearken back to the mid-to late 1990s, before the 2001 terror attack, when border waits were a fraction of what they are now.
Mark Reed, who was district director at the time and now is an Arizona-based consultant, said when he was in charge he established a rule that the average wait at San Ysidro be no longer than 20 minutes.

“If that border crossing isn't regarded as a lifeline for the economy, I don't know what is,” he said.

Reed said he succeeded in eliminating the border bottleneck because community leaders helped persuade Washington officials to beef up staffing, so he could open more lanes at all times of the day and night.

“We found that with added resources, it's not only having the lanes open buthow long you have them open and how soon you open them,” he said. “And we found our enforcement capabilities increased dramatically.”

Reed acknowledged that he didn't have the terrorism issues to deal with that current port officials do, and that both San Diego's and Tijuana's populations and their cross-border business connections have increased since he dealt with the border bottlenecks.

Still, he said, there are ways that traffic flows could be speeded up.

More efforts should be made to slash wait times for frequent crossers and trusted travelers, who account for about three-quarters of port-of-entry traffic, he said.

“Most of the people should be in a SENTRI-like program,” Reed said. “They should open up 16 lanes for people you know something about.”

Four of the 24 lanes at San Ysidro are used for SENTRI now, although two can be converted to accommodate regular traffic.

Fasano said she has done all she can to open lanes and extend hours. And she will soon institute electronic enrollment in SENTRI in hopes of getting more frequent crossers in the program.

The only real relief, however, will be expanding the San Ysidro crossing by shifting southbound traffic to the old Virginia Avenue-El Chaparral commercial crossing and building a new border crossing east of the Otay Mesa port of entry, called Otay II.

A few months ago, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and Baja California Gov. Eugenio Elorduy Walther led a delegation of elected officials and business leaders from both sides of the border to seek support for the projects. But even if the Bush administration and Congress approve them, it will be years before the region sees relief.

Advocates are focusing on promoting passage of the infrastructure bond measure that will be on the November ballot, said SANDAG's Gallegos. Some of the funds, if approved, could be used for highway projects and land purchases to support the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa crossing projects.

“It could help jump-start Otay II and fix some of the things we've been neglecting over the last decades,” he said. “We're hopeful some of those dollars will find their way down to the border.”

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Diane Lindquist: (619) 293-1812; diane.lindquist@uniontrib.com