CA May End Time Change With Permanent Daylight Saving Time

CALIFORNIA — For Kansen Chu, this week's push to make daylight saving time permanent is tremendously exciting, he told Patch on Wednesday.

The U.S. Senate voted Tuesday to end the biannual practice of switching the clocks. Chu, a former Bay Area Assemblyman, co-authored and managed to pass one of the first known bills to oust the practice.

"I think we'll finally be able to get there after so many years," he said.

While California's Proposition 7 did pass in 2018 — garnering support from 60 percent of voters — it also required a two-thirds vote from the State Senate. That vote never happened since states do not have the power to enact year-round daylight saving time. That authority rests in the federal government.

"We have so many reasons to abandon this antiquated practice," Kansen said. "It causes health issues, there's some scientific proof that it increases heart attack rates, work-related accidents and it's also a pubic safety issue."

Back in 2017, Kansen did extensive research to co-author Prop 7 with Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego). The idea of switching the clocks was originally created to accommodate farmers to offer more daylight hours to work in the field, Kansen said.

"I talked to the farmers and they just laughed and said 'you know, we get up when we need and we'll quit when we have to do and it has nothing to do with the clock,'" he said.

The Senate's move to pass the Sunshine Protection Act this week affirms an increasing unpopular view of the disruptive “spring forward, fall back” ritual.

Most states have some sort of legislation on the matter.

The bill will now head to the House and must be signed by President Joe Biden to become law.

Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and the chief sponsor of the bill, said in remarks on the Senate floor "it's an idea whose time has come.”

"You'll see it's an eclectic collection of members of the United States Senate in favor of what we've just done here in the Senate, and that's to pass a bill to make daylight savings time permanent," Rubio said in remarks on the Senate floor.

“Just this past weekend, we all went through that biannual ritual of changing the clock back and forth and the disruption that comes with it. And one has to ask themselves after a while, why do we keep doing it?”

Daylight saving time is observed across the United States, except in Hawaii and most of Arizona, which opted out of the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which mandated daylight saving time. States are allowed to vote to make standard time permanent, but not DST.

In Arizona, where the temperature can routinely reach a scorching 115 degrees, it’s a matter of retaining earlier sunsets and cooler evening temperatures. But the decision not to participate in the time adjustment isn’t universal in Arizona. Daylight saving time is observed on the Navajo Reservation, which surrounds the Hopi Reservation, which doesn’t.

Because Hawaii is far south of mainland states, with a latitude similar to Mexico City's, lawmakers there haven’t seen the need to increase the hours of daylight. The U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands also don’t observe daylight saving time.

At least 22 states have introduced legislation this year to switch to year-round daylight saving time, year-round standard time or allow voters to decide the issue, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another 18 have trigger laws on the books that would take effect if Congress were to allow such a change.

Daylight saving time has been around since World War I. But it became the law of the land more than 50 years ago with the Uniform Time Act of 1966, though the exact dates — now the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November — have changed some over the years.

Who really benefits from the time change?

Proponents may argue that longer evenings motivate people to get out of the house. The extra hour of daylight can be used for outdoor recreation such as golf, soccer, baseball, running and more. It also benefits the tourism industry.

However, critics say the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. The time change can mess with our body clocks and circadian rhythms, making for some restless nights and sleepy days. It also is difficult to quantify the economic cost of the collective tiredness caused by daylight saving time, but studies have found a decrease in productivity after the spring transition.