An effort in the Mississippi House of Representatives to permit police to pull over drivers who are not buckled will have to wait until next year.

The seat-belt legislation died after the March 9 deadline for House and Senate committees to report out bills and constitutional amendments originating in their chambers.

Three bills that sought to create a primary law for seat-belt enforcement remained in the House Transportation Committee at the deadline.

Under current law, police can ticket drivers and passengers for seat-belt violations only after stopping a vehicle for another traffic violation.

“It doesn’t make sense to have a law on the books with no teeth in it,” one of the authors of the seat-belt bill, Rep. Rita Martinson, R-Madison, recently told The Clarion-Ledger.

If signed into law, it could put Mississippi in line for additional federal money.

The Bush administration recently proposed an incentive program to encourage states to increase seat-belt enforcement. The program would provide grants worth $100 million a year for highway safety or construction programs to states that pass a primary seat-belt law or show a seat-belt-usage rate of at least 90 percent.

Failure to do one or the other would result in a loss of up to 4 percent of federal highway funds to the state. In Mississippi, that would mean $9 million, the newspaper reported.