Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - How long was your last wait time to cross into the United States? One regular commuter says it's become a crapshoot as to whether you wait a short or long time on the bridges.
Jamie Fiegel is an immigration attorney who commutes each day from Fort Erie to Buffalo. She says border delays have been extremely heavy during the summer during the week, getting lesser by the weekend. "It's just a crapshoot of every day," says Fiegel, noting she waited up to 50 minutes last week to cross into the U.S.
"It seems that 8 a.m. sometimes they open up another lane or two, sometimes Nexus has one lane open. And there's many regular processing lines open leaving the Nexus lane to block the access to the bridge, because it's backed up from the one Nexus lane that's open all the way on to the bridge," said Fiegel.
Congressman Brian Higgins told WBEN that resident complaints about bridge delays were especially bad last week.
Higgins' office reached out to Customs and Border Protection, who said that there was a tech outage impacting primary and secondary inspections, requiring agents to resort to slower back-up systems. The outage was nationwide but has now been resolved.
Fiegel said she can come up with a couple of ideas to improve matters. "Having enough lanes open is number one, how many lanes are open and how many officers are going to be processing that regular traffic and Nexus traffic," suggests Fiegel. She says two NEXUS lanes and four regular lanes can make a big difference. She also believes manpower and training are key. "I believe that the government doesn't have enough workers right now to be able to handle that many lanes and that's a major sticking point, to be able to open those lanes when you don't have enough people to do that," says Fiegel.