Council Approves Ports Of Entry Task Force To Address Wait Times

Tired of long wait times at the international bridges?

El Paso City Council unanimously approved a resolution Tuesday that will create a bi-national task force to address wait times at the Borderland’s six international ports of entry.

The task force will consist of 14 representatives from different agencies, departments or offices who will all have input on implementing recommendations to reduce bridge wait times. Council members have labeled this their top federal issue.

“Even though we have been making a lot of noise, it doesn’t seem like the problem is getting much better,” City Representative Steve Ortega said. “The success of this task force will be shown by whether or not we are successful in reducing the wait times.”

Among the 14 members of the task force will be representatives from U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Washington, D.C. and El Paso, representatives from the mayors’ office in El Paso and Juarez and El Paso’s International Bridges Department.

It didn’t take long for the first recommendation to surface.

“It seemed that once we dispersed the traffic it did help alleviate the bridge wait times,” said West Side City Rep. Cortney Niland, pointing out a recent diversion of commercial traffic to the Zaragoza Port of Entry and away from the Bridge of the Americas for construction reasons.

“The data that Customs and Border Protection was able to show us was that it did actually alleviate some of the bridge wait times. I think it would be very important to create a commercial hub out at Zaragoza where we are not landlocked and we can really address the commercial traffic,” said Niland.

But not everybody likes that idea.

“It’s really not fair to shift all that traffic into one area,” East Side City Rep. Eddie Holguin said, indicating that sending all the trucks to Zaragoza will have a negative impact on his side of town. “What they should be doing is separating the traffic equally amongst all of the bridges and not shift ’em all to one part of town.”

Mayor John Cook said it’s issues like this that make a task force the right solution.

“The real benefit of this task force is everybody is going to communicate at the same time,” Cook said.

Other issues that came up during Monday’s discussion were finding an accurate way to assess wait times and southbound checkpoints for cash and weapons.

Cook expects the task force to come up with an agenda and meet for the first time within 30 days.