Bottlenecks at Mississippi driver’s-license offices can be alleviated by greater use of online renewal, the agency’s director said here Monday.

Underfunding has led the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol to temporarily close some offices and leave some others short-staffed, said Col. Marvin Curtis.

Curtis, who began his career in Utica and worked as a Warren County deputy sheriff before joining the highway patrol, made his comments as guest speaker of the Warren County Bar Association at its regular monthly meeting.

Curtis said staff at driver’s-license offices that become crowded with people will make announcements informing them that the option exists for many people to renew online.

“Half the crowd leaves because they didn’t know that,” he said.

The option allows people whose addresses have not changed since their last renewal to receive a renewal sticker by mail and continue using their current license for another term. People may use the option only every other time they renew; photos must be updated with alternate renewals.

“Trying to find somebody to fill these slots is hard,” Curtis said of the personnel who staff the MHP’s driver’s license offices, like the one in Warren County, which is in the Warren County Youth Detention complex at 1100 Grove St.

The Vicksburg office is among those whose staffing levels the MHP is working to increase, Curtis said.

The temporary closure of license offices was not made to make a political point, Curtis said.

“We just did not have the people because we did not have the money,” he said.

Understaffing at the MHP is not limited to the driver’s-license area, Curtis said. The agency is short about 150 troopers, but about a third of that shortage will be made up by a new class of cadets set to begin training in November, he added.

“Of 75 to 80 cadets we hope to graduate, about 50 and have 50 new troopers out on the road to help us,” Curtis said.

Curtis also discussed ways the state agency is using or plans to use technology to improve detection of acts like attempted driver’s-license fraud and failure of convicted sex offenders to comply with registration requirements.

Among the technologies in use is one that can compare photographs of people’s faces for identity-verification, he said. The process is called “biometrics” and has helped lead to an arrest in north Mississippi in at least one case, Curtis said.

Field devices that can read magnetic strips on driver’s licenses and automate the transmission to headquarters of information gathered from them and other sources, such as breathalyzer machines, are also expected to be in use by the MHP soon, Curtis said.