Tampa Airport Employees Complain About Parking Lot Security
Lax security in the employee parking lot and shuttle at Tampa International Airport is a potential danger to the airport, passengers and crew, say dozens of airline employees.
The employee parking lot in a remote area north of the main terminal is not fully enclosed by a security fence, allowing anyone to walk from the street into the sprawling lot with 2,400 spaces, says the Tampa Tribune. And drivers of the airport-operated shuttle buses generally board passengers without asking them to show identification badges, the paper reports.
Tampa International officials, alerted to the issues that employees raised in more than two dozen interviews in recent weeks with The Tribune, said that they will pursue improvements. “It’s important that the people who work at the airport and use our employee buses feel safe,” Janet Zink, assistant vice president of media and government relations, wrote in an email. "We will explore the possibility of checking badges before employees get on the buses so that only people who have security clearance will have access to the shuttles,” she said.
Perimeter and airfield security fall under an airport’s jurisdiction and are delineated in each airport’s Airport Security Plan, said The Tribune. In addition, the TSA requires every commercial airport to have procedures that govern entry into the secured area of an airport and to have incident prevention and response mechanisms that include redundancies for safety and security, it said.
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