The Charleston Passport Center's new director, Tim Wiesnet, recently visited Portsmouth to learn that center's operations firsthand. The Department already has a finance center in Charleston on what used to be a Navy base, where the passport center will also be located. Of the Portsmouth center's staff, only 61 members are State employees, demonstrating a successful public- private partnership. The bank assigns each applicant a bar code, which becomes the passport number that can be tracked throughout the system. On a Monday morning, as many as 50,000 applications may be waiting in the center's mailroom where contract employees scan, batch and send them to the main floor.
Federal employees review the applications to verify citizenship and identity.
Once approved, the passport information is printed into the familiar blue book from the Government Printing Office. Before going out the door, however, each passport receives a final quality control check. Expedited applications are processed within three days. As the demand for passports has increas-ed, so has the black market. To ensure that blank books don't leave the center, employees at its 19 work stations must account for all of the books they handle daily, she said.