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A planned pullout March 26 has officials at TIA and elsewhere scrambling to fill the security void.
By JEAN HELLER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 6, 2002
National Guard troops deployed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks plan to leave the nation's airports March 26, a move that is creating havoc among airport officials in Florida and elsewhere.
The new federal Transportation Security Administration quietly informed airport directors last month that the armed Guard personnel would leave late in March and ordered that they be replaced with local police.
These officers would remain in place until the TSA can develop its own cadre of 9,000 federal police officers to take up permanent positions at airport security checkpoints.
Creating a new federal police agency could take a year or more. It had been widely assumed that the National Guard would remain in place until that federal force was ready, one reason the March 26 withdrawal date caught airport managers by surprise.
With less than three weeks until the deadline, airports including Tampa International and St. Petersburg-Clearwater International need to find enough certified officers on their own forces and from local police agencies to fill the need. Heightened police presence at public events and a huge demand for off-duty officers to do private security in the aftermath of Sept. 11 has left little leeway.
"We have four security checkpoints, so we would need at least 20 police officers to meet our needs," said Louis Miller, executive director of TIA. "We don't have anything like that available within our own department. We have 51 uniformed officers already spread thin all over the airport property. Making arrangements with the Hillsborough sheriff and the Tampa police takes time. They don't have a lot of extra personnel, either."
TIA officials would contract with the outside police agencies to provide a set number of officers each shift. Regardless of whether the officers worked at the airport on their regular shifts or on overtime, the federal government would pick up the tab.
"There are no budget ramifications for TIA," Miller said.
Late Tuesday, Katie Hughes, spokeswoman for the Tampa Police Department, and Debbie Carter, spokeswoman for the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, said they had heard nothing about helping provide police coverage at the airport.
On Tuesday afternoon, with the concurrence of the international airports in Miami, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood and Sarasota-Bradenton, TIA asked the Transportation Security Administration to extend the deadline for National Guard pullout for at least 60 to 90 days to allow time to develop full police presences at those facilities.
"While we certainly recommend the placement of local law enforcement personnel at the screening checkpoints at the termination of the National Guard deployment, we find the limited time to respond and the logistical issues involved to be significant and onerous," Ed Cooley, senior director of TIA operations, said in an e-mail to the TSA.
Cooley asked that the agency "consider extending the National Guard for a reasonable amount of time . . . to allow airport directors sufficient time to implement a workable plan."
The Florida Airports Council, made up of the state's airport managers, passed a resolution seeking such an extension.
Paul Turk, a spokesman in Washington for TSA, said the Guard was deployed on orders of individual governors, "so if there are a lot of requests for extensions, they'll probably wind up back in the individual state capitals."
Gov. Jeb Bush's office was asked if he might consider an extension of Guard deployment in Florida but did not respond.
The degree of hardship for the nation's airports really depends on how they are designed. TIA has four checkpoints, one in each of the operational airsides, so it would take about 20 officers to cover all shifts.
Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport, a much larger facility, has only one security checkpoint, which could be covered by about a half dozen officers.
Kansas City International Airport has 20 checkpoints, and Dallas-Fort Worth has 26 checkpoints. Each will need 100 officers or more.
Al Lomax, chief of the airport police in Kansas City, says the problem extends well beyond finding the officers to fill the slots.
"TSA is requiring us to maintain a police presence at the checkpoints beginning March 26, so even extending the Guard deployment doesn't fill the requirement because Guard members aren't police officers," Lomax said. "They're soldiers, but they have no police training, no police certification, no arrest powers, so they don't constitute a police presence."
Lomax has authorization to expand his force of 39 uniformed police officers by 23, but he hasn't yet completed hiring, and training takes six months.
"We're just not getting enough time," he said.
It could have been worse. When the TSA first notified airports of the Guard pullout, the agency insisted that there be two police officers at each checkpoint on each shift.
"That was out of the question," Miller said. "They heard from airport managers, and they scaled it back to one."
Miller said he thinks a short extension for Florida airports is possible, "but if it doesn't happen, we'll deal with it somehow by the 26th." He hopes to have plans in place to take to his board of directors at its regular meeting Thursday.
The Guard has been operating at airports across the country in reduced numbers since after the holidays and has already been withdrawn from other deployments, such as nuclear power plants and the Kennedy Space Center. It remains a presence at the Port of Tampa, but for how long is still in question.
"Right now, there's a contingency plan in place for our withdrawal from the port," said Capt. Vernon Dohmann of the Florida National Guard. "Our orders were for six months, and that's up on March 28. I have heard some discussion of an extension into April."
-- Times staff writer Tamara Lush contributed to this report.