Receiving your passport at an airport 30 minutes before your flight isn’t the best way to start a summer vacation.

But that scenario and other close calls or canceled trips have resulted from changes this year in federal travel requirements, causing a backlog of 3 million passport applications nationwide.

Congress is trying to fix the problem: On July 16, the House unanimously approved the Passport Backlog Reduction Act, which calls upon retired State Department staffers to help process passports.

With days or hours left before their flights, desperate Kansans have turned to their congressional leaders for help obtaining passports.

“So far this year, my office has heard from over 400 Kansans who’ve experienced severe problems with their passport applications,” U.S. Rep. Nancy Boyda, D-Kan., said in a news release. “Too many have had to delay or cancel their business trips, vacations, honeymoons and other travels.”

Backlog

The backlog began in January when a new law went into effect requiring Americans traveling by air to start carrying passports to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda.

According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the State Department did not take the necessary steps to prepare for the increase in passport applications, which extended the average processing time from 10 weeks up to 18 weeks.

To curb the problem, the federal government temporarily suspended the requirement. Now, U.S. citizens who have a birth certificate and a government-issued identification card such as a driver’s licensecan fly to those locations without a passport through Sept. 30.

Still, problems persists, partly because some people who already had applied for a passport had sent their birth certificate with it, so they had to obtain another copy.

Linda Beers, general clerk at the Lawrence post office, said the temporary travel flexibility has decreased wait time for passports, but on average it’s still taking 12 to 14 weeks. Those who pay extra to expedite their passport may see it in a month, but she said there’s “no way” she would give people a true time frame.

“People have lost thousands of dollars because they missed a flight,” Beers said. “They thought it would take 10 weeks and here it was 10 weeks and they didn’t have a passport.”

Help from lawmakers

David Hong, of Lawrence, was offered a job in Seoul, South Korea, last month. He couldn’t fly there for a trip with his family because his sons’ renewal passports had not yet arrived.

He had his passport expedited, so it arrived on time for the trip. But he spent hours on the phone with a Washington, D.C., agency trying to get his sons’ passports.

He had to push back two flights, costing him about $700.

Finally a passport office representative advised him to call his congressman. Within 24 hours after making a phone call to Boyda’s office, Hong’s sons’ passports were sent overnight to his home at no charge.

“I was a little shocked that an average Joe or Jill who wants to get anything done with the federal government is pretty helpless and has their hands tied behind their back, and it only takes one call to the representative’s office,” he said.

Passport agencies

Hong said he was willing to travel to an agency to speed up the process, but the nearest passport agencies are in Aurora, Colo., which opened three months ago, and Chicago. The National Passport Center is in New Hampshire, and there are offices in Houston and Charleston, S.C.

Gilda Lintz, district director for U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts’ Topeka office, said Kansas passport applications generally go to Houston. She said passport office staff from various locations had to assist the Houston agency, because at one point they had about 1,100 applicants waiting outside their walk-up window. It’s the only office with such a feature.

If people are really in a bind they can go to Aurora, Lintz said.

“That has really helped a lot of people,” she said.

The Aurora office helped a Fort Riley soldier, Sgt. Claude Cornelius, who was trying to fly home in May to Antigua, an island in the Caribbean, to attend his father’s funeral. The trip cost him $600. He told soldiers in his company to consider applying for a passport now just in case something like this happened to them.

Help on the way

U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore’s Lawrence office is preparing to launch an online form for people to submit their passport request information electronically instead of calling the office.

“We’ve been pretty successful,” said Rebecca Black, spokeswoman for Moore’s office. “I ran the numbers for how many cases we’ve had in 2007, and it’s close to 1,000. Last year was less than 100.”

James Hanni, executive vice president of AAA Kansas, attributes some of the backlog to people not scheduling trips in advance.

“We used to see people plan several months in advance; now it’s several weeks out,” he said. “I think people are just busy and with schedules it’s hard to plan things.”