Sen. Mitt Romney on chances of passport office coming to Salt Lake City
Sen. Mitt Romney went to a passport fair in Salt Lake City with one sole purpose: “To encourage the State Department to open a passport office” in Utah, he told reporters on Friday.
“We have a lot of people in Utah who do a lot of travel internationally. We have a lot of missionaries, we have a lot of families, big families. They want to go around the world and see different places,” said Romney. But the closest passport office is in Denver, at least 500 miles away from Salt Lake City.
Romney highlighted the legislative provisions he helped author aimed at ramping up passport services across the country. These provisions were passed as a part of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2024.
The legislation requires the State Department to install a passport office in a populated city that is more than a five-hour drive from a passport agency with urgent, in-person passport services.
“I think we’ve been able to show that the people in Utah are very anxious to have a passport office here such that emergencies can be dealt with on a person-to-person basis,” Romney said, and thanked Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs Rena Bitter, who accompanied him on the tour, for her willingness to host several passport fairs in the state in collaboration with Utah’s congressional delegation.
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Romney also noted that over 1,500 appointments filled up in the first 30 hours.
Karen Cravens told the Deseret News her experience at the passport fair was “good” and “fast” allowing her to take care of her worries about her passport.
Lindsey Moreau and her family also managed to get one of the appointment slots after seeing an ad about the passport fair on Facebook. She waited in line to get brand new passports ahead of a trip to Cancun, Mexico and Guadeloupe Island for shark diving.
“Hopefully it’ll be pretty quick and streamlined and we can get it done and just wait until it shows up in the mail,” she said. Moreau said it’s better than driving to Denver for an appointment. “If we could put an office here, I think it would solve a lot of problems, especially since we have a brand new airport.”
She will be issued the “Next Generation” passport, which features a polycarbonate data page, laser engraving, and updated artwork. Romney revealed he, too, had the latest version.
The GOP Senator said he can’t order the State Department to choose Salt Lake City as the location for a new passport office but he can encourage the federal agency to do so.
The Deseret News asked when the Beehive State should expect a passport office of its own. To this, Bitter responded that the State Department is researching locations around the country, and will get the ball rolling in the next few months on choosing where to put offices.
If other cities besides Salt Lake show a greater need for such an office, then the State Department “would perhaps not give us the shot to have an office next, but I think the data we’ve been looking at suggests we’re going to do just fine,” Romney said after Bitter’s response.
As he noted, “Utah receives 250,000 passports a year.”
Salt Lake City is the west-coast hub for Delta Airlines. Plus, Romney said, the Olympics will almost certainly come to Utah in 2034, which creates an additional need for an office.
“The demands on the State Department and passports in particular, and customs and immigration when you have athletes coming from all over the world is pretty significant,” he said. “And having a passport office would probably allow us to be able to respond to the kinds of emergencies that are inevitably going to occur when people come from all over the world — athletes and spectators.”
Romney urged people to make sure their passport is valid for 6 months before planning any international travels.
It takes six to eight weeks to issue a new passport, he said. “Secretary (Bitter) said to me that one reason is there’s a human being that looks at each application. It’s not done by AI, or... by computer,” he said.
Bitter said the process also takes time because the volume of requests has increased. In 2006, about 30% of Americans had passports, but the number has now increased to 48%, she added.
In 2022, the State Department issued close to 22 million passports, setting a record for the federal agency. Then, in 2023, the State Department surpassed this record with 24 million passports issued.
“The very good news is that more Americans can travel now than at any time in our history, which is really a wonderful, wonderful thing,” Bitter said. “For us, it means that we have to look at as many ways as possible to both preserve national security but also to be efficient and quick to be able to serve the American people.”
Check Travel.State.Gov for travel-related information on all countries.
