Let the sun shine later, proposal says

Let’s get one thing straight about the powers of Congress and the Arkansas Legislature: They cannot create any more sunshine.

Literally, I mean. As a journalist, I always believe political leaders can figuratively create more sunshine by making government decision-making and records open and transparent to the public. Open government advocates have long referred to the act of letting more sunshine in, in effect illuminating the proverbial (and sometimes real) back rooms where secretive deals are struck.

We always need more of that kind of sunshine.

But this time, I’m referring to daylight saving time, which officially began at 2 a.m. today and continues for 238 days, until Nov. 3. That’s when we will collectively “fall back” into standard time, which will continue 126 days until March 8, 2020. Then we groggily start it all over again.

From time to time, especially each spring and fall as debate about the value of our annual time shifts heat up, I get the impression some people believe legislation in Congress or in our state Legislature will actually change the amount of daylight our little spot on this planet receives each day.

Sunrise and sunset come at a rate affected by the earth’s position relative to the sun. Remember those junior high lessons about the planets? It takes one year for the earth to complete its orbit of the sun. It’s “tilt” remains unchanged as it moves around the sun. The movement of the earth changes the distribution of the sunlight on the earth’s surface, giving us our different seasons. We get fewer hours of sunlight in the winter and more during the summer, generally speaking.

But no, legislation cannot change the number of hours the sun shines on Arkansas.

Daylight saving time, first during World War I, instead affects our man-made relationship to sunlight. As of 2 a.m. today, we’ve shifted our time schedules ahead by an hour. That means the sun, which rose above the horizon Saturday at 6:36 a.m. in Northwest Arkansas, didn’t see the light of day (so to speak) until 7:35 a.m. today. Our relationship to the sun shifts, pushing more sunlight to our evenings.

State Rep. Sarah Capp of Ozark originally proposed to keep Arkansas on standard time — no springing forward or falling ball — all year round. She withdrew that bill. Now, she’s proposed a resolution in the General Assembly to “preserve sunshine” by calling on Congress to allow states to permanently “spring forward” and end the “inconvenience” of annually shifting back and forth.

According to her resolution, the state’s only option to the annual switch under federal law is to stay on standard time, which would mean more of each day’s “dark time” would fall within the time period most people consider their working day.

The biggest con to such an approach is the impact it would have on the traditional work/school day during winter. On Dec. 21, the shortest day of the year, sunrise would happen around 8:24 a.m. with sunset at 6:06 p.m. But there are those who say shifting more sunlight to the evening hours would promote people being active in their after-work/school hours.

Some folks say people could adjust to all that and would appreciate giving up the back-and-forth of changing our clocks twice a year. Some research suggests the twice-annual clock change messes all of us up for a few days as our bodies adjust to a new time schedule.

How about you?

I don’t care for staying on standard time through the summer. I prefer those longer summer evenings after work, the opportunity to get outside. Staying on daylight saving time seems, to me, like a bright idea.