WASHINGTON – Minnesota's top politicians said Tuesday they're dissatisfied with the federal response to solving extreme security screening delays at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Snaking lines at the airport's newly reconfigured security checkpoints have sparked wait times of an hour or more, causing sharp criticism and missed flights at the height of one of the busiest travel seasons — spring break.
"They need to hire more people at our airports, and clearly we [Minnesota] were being short-shrifted here during this transition," Sen. Amy Klobuchar said Tuesday, noting federal officials have not caught up with the hiring they are authorized to do. "It made me really mad because I stood by their budget."
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials said this week they were going to dispatch bomb-sniffing canine teams to MSP to help screen bags and passengers, but it was not clear how quickly that would solve the problem.
Minnesotans have pressured DFL Gov. Mark Dayton and Sens. Klobuchar and Al Franken, both Democrats, to do something about the delays — particularly as a growing state economy requires more people to travel in and out of the Twin Cities and officials stare down a bustling summer travel season.
"MSP serves as a hub for major carriers and has long had one of the best-designed and most efficient security checkpoints in the nation," Dayton wrote recently in a scathing letter to TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger, who has committed to visiting MSP soon. "However, the TSA has ruined this efficiency by changing the configuration of the checkpoints. Some passengers are reporting waits in security lines that are ten or more times longer than under the previous system."
Franken called the problems unacceptable.
"We need immediate action to address long lines at our airport and to ensure that Minnesota travelers are screened in a timely manner — and this means we need enough open checkpoints and enough agents at those checkpoints," Franken said in a statement.
