Budget Tightening Has Customs' Line Down to a Crawl

FROM PAGE IA

elers have had fistfights over a place in line. "It's getting to the point that I'm worried about people's safety," says Jack Evans, director of the U.S. Customs facility at the airport.

AND IT'S uncomfortable. So many travelers jam into the Customs room at peak hours that the air conditioning can't cool them.

"I've never felt this kind of heat in an airport before," said Peter! Read, London-born Norwegian businessman trying to usher his wife Sue, daughter, Alyson, 7, and twins, Andrea and Theresa, 6, through Customs last Thursday.

The scene was chaotic: lines were crossing, baggage was stuck in the carousel, travelers were stumbling over cartons, children were crying, dufflebags and valises tossed in confusion against walls.

Read's little girls still had their sweaters on from the plane. Their faces were moist, they were getting cranky. "I'm tired," Andrea told Theresa.

Read was assured that the air conditioning was working. "Really?" he replied. "You wouldn't think so, would you?"

The Reads made the trip from the plane to the Customs exit in just over an hour.. Two hours is not unusual.

IT'S NOT a question of incompetence. "Nobody's saying (Immigra tion and Customs officers) are a bunch of bums not doing their jobs," Spofford says: "We know they really feel for the passengers."

The problem is this: Miami Is the nation's second busiest international airport, after only New York's John F. Kennedy. Customs here handled 1.3 million travelers in 1974; 1.5 million in 1975; 1.7 mil

BECAUSE of that, 13 international flights landed at Miami In"ternational Airport between 2 and 4 p.m. last Thursday, while the Reads were being processed.

How to cope with the everheightening peaks is where the argument lies. The Aviation Department says all the manpower in the world won't help unless Customs. and Immigration devise new procedures. Customs and Immigration say they already have done that but the reforms have been frustrated by lack of manpower.

The whole system of prying into the affairs of international air travelers is excessive,, Spofford says, and it amounts to a' form of discrimination, that is likely to drive away tourists that Miami depends on for its living.

"An air traveler gets a hell of a lot more thorough search than people who come in other ways, like boats, yachts or private planes," Spofford says.

"And (Customs) won't do less. than a 100 per cent search, and that's absurd," he says.

"I JUST can't believe there's that much (contraband) coming in through airports," he says.

Customs and Immigration could make things faster by revising their techniques, Spofford says. One new technique, he says, would be "One-Stop Passport Control."

Now, Immigration agents look at a traveler's passport and check his name in their book of unwelcome. aliens and other evildoers; then Customs looks at the passport and punches the name into a computer that checks whether the traveler is wanted, or is a likely cocaine smuggler.

Why not, demands Spofford, combine the two and use only Customs almost-instantaneous

com

puter for both? Why not use the European "red-green" system? In

lion in 1976. This year's peak Au-that, the traveler himself decides to gust period is expected to be 25 ta 30 per cent bigger than last August's.

National Airlines has just added a new Paris flight, using DC10s ca pable of carrying nearly 300 gersons. Iberia is about to start flying nonstop from Madrid to Miami; Pan Am is preparing to do the same; National has 'applied for a Luxembourg flight.g

And they all tend to land here in midafternoon, the result of what airline officials call an unchangea

timetable of flights from six or ght hours away taking off in the morning, when the passengers demand them.

get in a "red" line if he has dutiable items, and a "green" line that is checked on only a random basis if he has none. j.

THOSE WHO run Customs and Immigration disagree with much of that. "Those 'small amounts' of contraband carried in by air travelers may not be so small,' says: David Rohr, staff member of the U.S. House subcommittee considering Customs reforms. "And usually, they're the very high-priced drugs. A couple kilos of cocaine can be: concealed on the body, and be worth an astronomical amount."

Just last Monday, Miami Customs agents point out, they arrested Wendy Roth, a 30-year-old, Toronto resident passing through Miami from La Paz, Bolivia, who allegedly had 4.6 pounds of cocaine worth $1.1 million concealed in a special girdle.

During 1976 alone, Miami Customs agents seized 180 pounds of crystal cocaine and 3,091 ounces of liquid cocaine from 228 smugglers, spokesman Jim Dingfelder said. The crystal coke was worth $43.2 million; liquid coke is more difficult to price, he said.

CUSTOMS is remarkably fast, Dingfelder says, if you consider that they are responsible for en

forcing laws for nearly 400 other U.S. agencies keeping out fruit flies for the Agriculture Department, checking neutrality law violators for the State Department, catching counterfeiters for the Treasury Department and so on.

Customs also must protect the nation's revenues, leafing through a 600-page tariff schedule of the United States to charge proper duties on items.

And Customs already has reformed said. itself, Dingfelder Miami, in fact, was the first port in the country to get the new Customs Accelerated Passenger Inspection System that has speeded up checking of individual passengers.

THE IDEA of the system is to have a primary Customs inspector briefly question a traveler, quickly check his hand luggage, then make one of two choices. If the inspector believes the traveler is honest and has no dutiable items, he can send him immediately out the door. If he believes a duty must be paid or a further check, is needed, he passes the passenger on to a secondary inspector.

Most travelers are processed in four minutes or less when the system works.

But the system seldom works, because Customs is so short of 'manpower that much of the time there are no secondary inspectors on many of the Customs tables. In fact, Dingfelder says, Customs is unable to man more than 11 or 12. of its 14 tables even during the heaviest peak periods.

The same is true in Immigration. Only 14 of the 19 booths are manned during peak hours, said William F. Moriarty, Immigration director at the airport. Lines there are so long that they're about to tear out one wall and move the booths so there will be more room. for the lines.

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AND THE situation is going to get worse, not better, they say: Under government-wide manpower cut orders issued by President Carter's Office of Management and Budget, Immigration is permitted to hire only three new agents for every four who quit or retire; Customs may hire only one for every four who leave. So even if their budgets permit hiring more people, they are not allowed to.

They end up spending the money anyway, on overtime. The average Immigration or Customs agent works, 60 hours a week, the agencies' directors say, with the final 20 hours of it on overtime. They get time-and-one-half or, on Sundays, double-time. Some say it

Family Waits to Clear Miami Customs foreign visitor mops brow as system bogs down

would be cheaper to hire the new people.

EUROPE'S "red-green" system is falling out of favor even in Europe, says Evans, of Customs in Miami. "It's too porous; we need a verbal confrontation between every passenger and the customs officer.

"Random sampling would take all the professionalism out of Customs," he goes on. "We might as well have robots if we're just going to pick every 12th passenger. "It's unfair to the individuals. When we select them, it's far more fair to the innocent travelers."

So no solutions are imminent. Airport officials say they will try to cope with August's coming spurt by enlarging the Immigration waiting area and adding one more baggage carousel and a few new bagcheck tables at Customs. But Immigration will get only four more temporary employes; Customs may get none. Both will continue to lose manpower because of the semifreeze on replacement hiring.

Even long-range solutions. are uncertain. Within 18 months the $40-million International Satellite Terminal will be finished. Passengers will be whisked by automatic

cars on an elevated rail from the new concourse to enlarged Immigration and Customs facilities. A spacious new air conditioned lounge will be provided for waiting relatives.

CUSTOMS, for example, will be enlarged from its present 14 bagcheck tables to 32. To man the new tables, Miami Customs is requesting as many as 45 new agents.

Those in Washington watching the budget process say 45 new agents would be a miracle. They say the same is true for Immigration.

"

"I'm sure there will be an increàse," says John D. Robison, a U.S. Customs spokesman in Washington. "But there's no way to know how much, because that's up to Congress."

"I'm confident the act is nowhere near far-reaching enough to solve our problems here in Miami," Spofford says.

Even the $40 million worth of. new facilities, designed to handle projected passenger increases for seven years, now seem likely to be overtaxed within five.

"It's going to be a terrible battle to try to improve this situation," he

savs.