You’ve just scored free tickets for a Caribbean cruise leaving tomorrow. Your company’s Barcelona office needs you there Friday. A loved one back in Europe is ill.
If your passport was out of date, you might have had to make the drive to Miami or New Orleans to get a passport overnight.
With the opening of the Atlanta Passport Agency in downtown Atlanta, area residents with emergencies can get a passport the same day they apply for one. “We prefer you come in one day and pick it up the next, but we know we will have life-or-death events” that make even quicker service necessary, said Gale McCoy, director of the agency.
A ribbon cutting at the agency’s 10th-floor offices, housed in a building just across Peachtree Street from the Hyatt Regency, was held Monday, attended by Mayor Kasim Reed and Patrick F. Kennedy, the undersecretary of state for management.
Before adjourning to enjoy refreshments, including rectangular cookies iced to appear just like the familiar dark-blue travel document, Kennedy told the group that the U.S. has become increasingly international. In 1989, there were 7.3 million valid passports in circulation. Today, there are 103 million, he said.
The opening of this agency is part of a concerted effort to accommodate this demand that increased with the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative of 2009, which requires Americans re-entering the country from Canada or Mexico to have a valid passport. This and other new agencies were funded through stimulus funds.
Ann Stotler, the regional manager of passport services in the South, said Georgia’s 211 passport facilities, housed in U.S. post offices and other locations, can process applications faster than most customers realize, usually within a few weeks. But none are as fast as the new agency.
McCoy said the Atlanta office will probably handle about 50,000 applications a year. Though only opened for two weeks, the office has already found customers. Four were waiting in the lobby the morning of the ribbon cutting.
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