A total of 709 individuals applied for new Latvian passports during July’s seven-city tour of the United States by officials carrying a mobile processing station, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has announced.

The project, which concluded its U.S. tour on July 30, is an effort by the Latvian government to provide new passports for Latvian citizens abroad in advance of the Oct. 2 parliamentary election. The project is coordinated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and by the Ministry of the Interior’s Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs (Pilsonsības un migrācijas lietu pārvalde, or PMLP).

A similar tour is underway in Australia and another is set to begin in Canada.

The effort is funded by an allocation of LVL 49,416 approved in June by the Cabinet of Ministers. In their request for funding, the interior and foreign affairs ministries estimated about 1,800 Latvian citizens would be served in the three countries. Of those, 1,100 would be in the United States, so the U.S. tour has come up short of expectations.

Latvian organizations in the U.S., Canada and Australia also have supported the project.

Of the total served in the U.S., the largest number was in New York, where 175 Latvian citizens applied for new passports. Chicago was second with 173, followed by Los Angeles, 96; Minneapolis, 83; Boston, 64; Cleveland, 62; and Seattle, 56. In all, 448 citizens had registered for appointments, while another 261 showed up when the passport station came to their community.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that the U.S. tour took in about LVL 30,000 in passport application fees.

The mobile passport stations allow the government representatives to take digital passport photographs and to record biometric data through fingerprint scans. One representative each from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and from the PMLP make up the three teams sent to the U.S., Australia and Canada.

In Australia, a team already has visited Brisbane and Sydney, processing a total of 117 passport applications, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The team is wrapping up its visit to Melbourne and heads next to Adelaide and Perth.

Another team will begin its tour of Canada during the first week of August, stopping in Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver. The team is scheduled Aug. 5-7 in the Latvian Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto, followed by Aug. 10-11 in Edmonton and Aug. 13-14 in Vancouver. Further information about the team’s visit to Canada is available from the Latvian Embassy in Ottawa.

The passport project has not been without criticism. The center-left political party Harmony Centre (Saskaņas centrs), in a July 12 letter to Interior Minister Linda Mūrniece, questioned why the project is taking place just before the October election and shortly after Ģirts Valdis Kristovskis, head of the Vienotība political coalition, visited Latvian communities abroad. Kristovskis traveled to Canada and the U.S. in March and to Australia in June.

Mūrniece has not publicly responded to Harmony Centre’s letter.

Ten fire stations across Latvia, most of them in the eastern part of the country, will be renovated during the next five years in a USD 1.5 million project funded by the U.S. military.

The renovations, funded by the U.S. European Command’s (EUCOM) Civil Military Operations program and administered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Europe District, will go a long way toward reducing response times in the entire country, said Col. Intars Zitāns, deputy chief of the State Fire and Rescue Service of Latvia.

“Obviously this is going to improve our capability to respond to disasters more efficiently,” Zitāns said during a July 8 groundbreaking ceremony to commence renovation work on the Limbaži fire station, according to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report. “Together we are stronger and together we can accomplish better things.”

Besides the one in Limbaži, fire stations to be renovated are in Madona, Aizkraukle, Gulbene, Keipene, Liepāja, Līvani, Valka, Ventspils and Strenči. The USD 109,000 renovation in Limbaži and the USD 112,000 renovation in Limbaži are the first in the project. At Limbaži, the contractor will install three new overhead roll-up doors, a heating system, internal and external lighting systems, and paving in front of the new doors. At Madona, the contractor will replace existing doors, upgrade the electrical system, as well as construct a small addition in which large overhead roll-up doors will be installed.

The renovations follow a European Union-funded donation to Latvia of standard European-sized fire trucks, which were too large to fit in many of the older fire stations throughout the country, officials said. As such, all 10 renovation projects will at minimum retrofit larger overhead roll-up doors into the garages to support the new trucks.

“Although the fire and rescue service personnel were doing a fantastic job, they needed some help, especially in fitting new trucks that they were receiving into old garages that were built during the Soviet times,” said Lt. Col. Tom Butler, chief of EUCOM’s Office of Defense Cooperation.

Estonian contractor A/S Koger & Partnerid is employing local Latvian subcontractors and using local material to the greatest extent possible for the Limbaži and Madona projects, according to the Corps of Engineers.