Rosemount License Center to Drop Passport Applications

Beginning May 1, Rosemount residents will no longer be able to apply for passports at the Robert Trail Dakota County license center.

The move will affect about 65 applicants a month, according to Kathy Jensen, Dakota County’s director of service and license centers.

The Rosemount center will continue to issue birth and death certificates, as well as various licenses and vehicle registrations, but county residents who want to apply for passports must now visit license centers in Apple Valley, Burnsville, Hastings, Lakeville or West St. Paul.

The order to consolidate passport services came from the U.S. State Department, Jensen said. The official line: The feds want to cut down on passport fraud, which, according to all sources, has never been a problem in Minnesota.

But because the Rosemount location also provides access to birth and death records – which come directly from the Minnesota Department of Health – the decision was made to discontinue passport service there out of a federal concern for mixing access to vital records with passport applications.

“Minnesota is unique in that we’re very security conscious,” Jensen said. “We’ve gone down this road before with [the federal government], explaining that it’s really the Department of Health that holds the database [of birth and death records], and we’re just going in and printing them. But they’re just not buying it.”

Jensen said the county has spent months going over all the implications with the State Department.

“If you could see this folder of meetings and arguments and documentation that we’ve been having with them,” she said. “We keep asking for data, asking if we’re in compliance, and if there’s a loophole.”

State Department officials have never shared statistics on passport fraud with anyone in Jensen’s office.

“They’re very reluctant to share any information,” she said.

The county has worked with state legislators in an attempt to get around the new federal dictum, Jensen said, but the feds “hold the trump card.”

“They tell us what to do,” she said.

The Rosemount license center has offered passport services only since August 2009. The county learned last December that it needed to take steps to comply with the new federal rule as of May 1.

Jensen hopes that county residents who would have used the Rosemount center to apply for passports will now go to the center at 14955 Galaxie Ave. in Apple Valley.