Change to daylight saving awaits Congress approval

As you set your clocks back an hour this weekend, you may wonder why you’re doing it all. It was supposed to be different this time.

In the 2018 state legislative session, the Florida Legislature passed a law moving Florida permanently to daylight saving time.

Although the law passed the state Legislature and was signed by Gov. Rick Scott, it requires congressional approval to go forward.

Congress has not approved, despite a bill filed by U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. That bill has languished in the Senate Commerce Committee, along with a separate bill Rubio filed to switch the entire country permanently to daylight saving time. Those bills die when the session ends in mid-December.

Rubio’s office said he intends to refile the bills in the next congressional session.

The increased evening daylight hours in the Sunshine State

and the presumed positive effect on the tourism industry were the top reasons to support the bill when it was debated in Tallahassee, where the law was given the glowing moniker the Sunshine Protection Act and passed with overwhelming, bipartisan support — 33-2 in the Senate and 103-11 in the House.

One of those 11 “no” votes was state Rep. Rick Stark, D-Weston.

“I didn’t think it was a good idea, and I still don’t think it’s a good idea,” Stark said. “I was around during the 1970s when Richard Nixon during the gas crisis decided we were gonna have daylight savings time in the middle of the winter. I lived in Colorado at the time — the sun wasn’t rising until 9 o’clock in the morning.”

Stark cited not only worries over the safety of kids walking to school, but also the orthodox Jewish community.

“The times are gonna change as to when the sunsets on the weekend for the Sabbath,” he said. “It’s already a problem in the summer, and now you’re going to pile on in the winter?”

But Rubio’s office cited positives other than the presumed benefits to the tourism industry:

-- A reduction in car crashes because an hour of daylight shifts to the evening, during which there’s more traffic on the road. That fact has been confirmed by several studies in the National Institutes of Health’s Library of Medicine.

-- A 27 percent reduction in robberies, for which Rubio’s office cited a 2015 Brookings Institution report. That report actually shows an overall drop of 7 percent in robberies during daylight saving time, with a 27 percent drop during the suddenly sunnier evening hours, but still — less robberies.

Should Rubio file the bill in Congress next session, he’ll likely have some reinforcements in the form of state Sen. Greg Steube, R-Sarasota, who is running for the U.S. House and was the state Senate sponsor of the Sunshine Protection Act.

Should he be elected, Steube said he would carry the daylight saving time banner on to Washington, D.C., and would be even more supportive of Rubio’s nationwide alternative.

“If I get elected to Congress, what I would like to do is change it for the whole country,” Steube said. “Twenty-eight countries in the EU are moving toward the change, and 80 percent of Europeans support doing away with it.”

That 80 percent number comes from a massive online survey taken in Europe over this summer, in which the vast majority of the 4.6 million people who participated in it supported moving permanently to daylight saving time.

Steube is hopeful that a change in Europe could give Congress a push to make the change here. He said he’d be supportive of the Florida-only bill as well but hopes it would lead to an eventual nationwide end to the time change, citing concerns by the business community.

“If I’m in Florida, I’m going to have an hour difference in time,” Steube said. “That can make it difficult in terms of interstate commerce. … So if we did the country as a whole, then that would eliminate the problems on the business side.”

But for now, on Sunday, remember: spring forward, fall back.