Why Cut So Many Screeners In St. Louis?

The people who run Lambert Field in St. Louis are hopping mad. The TSA has decided to drastically cut the number of screeners assigned to St. Louis -- but won't tell airport officials exactly why.

Lambert executives still want answers. So now, they've hired a Dallas consulting firm to do its own analysis of airport security needs. The cost: $36,000. When it's all said and done, Lambert officials plan to compare their findings with those handed down by the TSA.

The decision from St. Louis came after the TSA announced it would cut the number of Lambert-based screeners by more than 21-percent -- more than at any other major airport in the country. At the same time, the number of flights and passengers that pass through Lambert is going up.

"It concerns us very much," Deputy Airport Director Gerald Slay told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "We just don't know what type of modeling they used when they did that."

The Dallas-based consultant will "determine the number of screeners we believe are necessary to staff the checkpoints," Slay told the St. Louis paper.

The TSA insists there will be no loss in either service or security. "When you boil it all down, there are two important messages for the airport, for the congressional delegation, the people in St. Louis and everyone who enjoys the service of Lambert Field," TSA Assistant Administrator Mark Hatfield told interviewers. "We will never allow a degradation in the security standards that we've set. Second is our commitment to customer service. That's as true for St. Louis as for any of the 450 airports around the country."

But already, peak-time passengers at Lambert move through security at the speed of sludge, with average wait times hitting 35-minutes an hour.

"We find that to be quite long," Slay told the Post-Dispatch. According to Hatfield, the average on-peak wait is 11-minutes.

"[T]hings like this (Lambert situation), whether they're good decisions or not, the fact that they can't even be articulate about what they're doing is exactly the kind of thing that's wrong with TSA," said Jim Carafano, homeland security analyst for the Heritage Foundation -- a conservative think tank based in Washington, DC. "The perception is that TSA is not an efficient and effective organization. If they don't address that, I think it's a long-term problem for the agency."

FMI: www.tsa.gov