Year-round daylight saving may go on ballot
If governor approves bill, voters could take next step in process
Tired of resetting your clock twice a year? Want to make these lovely, long summer afternoons last?
Let Gov. Jerry Brown know. A bill that would ask voters to approve making daylight saving time year-round in California and eliminate the seasonal shift to standard time in the fall and winter is on its way to the governor’s desk after passing out of the Legislature on Friday.
“It is time that we as a state reconsider whether this is still beneficial to our residents,” Assemblyman Kansen Chu, the San Jose Democrat who wrote the bill, said Fri- day.
No word yet from Brown’s office whether he will sign the bill. The governor tends not to comment on legislation before acting on it. He has 12 days after receiving the bill to sign or veto it or it becomes law automatically.
“While decisions on such timely issues can take hours,” said Ali Bay, the governor’s deputy press secretary, “we will alert you the minute one is made.”
If signed by the governor, Chu’s Assembly Bill 807 would place a measure on a future statewide ballot to repeal the state’s 1949
“We are no longer saving energy, and studies have shown this practice increases risk of heart attacks, traffic accidents and crimes.”
— Assemblyman Kansen Chu, D-San Jose
Daylight Saving Time Act and allow lawmakers to pass a new law making daylight saving time yearround. Should voters agree, it still would take an act of Congress to make daylight saving time permanent in California.
Chu’s bill faced no organized opposition, but some lawmakers such as Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Tehama, thought it was a waste of time.
“It’s fixing something that is not broken,” Nielsen said last week when the state Senate considered the bill. “Our society has acculturated itself to daylight savings time. I think it would create too much confusion to change it again.”
The bill passed overwhelmingly out of both houses.
Under the Uniform Time Act, a 1966 federal law, clocks must “spring forward” an hour on the second Sunday in March for daylight saving time and “fall back” an hour on the first Sunday in November for standard time.
The clock changes make for long, sunny afternoons and evenings in the spring and summer, when the days in California are longer anyway. As the days shorten in the fall and mornings get darker, the switch back to standard time brightens them up a bit, but that means it gets dark earlier in the afternoon.
The federal law allows states to choose whether to use daylight saving time. Arizona and Hawaii don’t. Chu originally considered that route for California, but youth sports leagues protested that it would deprive kids of practice time after school because it would get dark too early.
So Chu switched his focus to making daylight saving time year-round, which kept the coaches at bay but requires congressional blessing for an exemption from the federal time law.
It’s all the same to Chu. He just hates having to change his clock.
The time-changing ritual originated during wartime
as an energy-saving measure. But those benefits have been questioned by researchers, while other studies suggest the backand-forth clock switching is hard on our minds and bodies.
“We are no longer saving energy,” Chu said, “and studies have shown this practice increases risk of heart attacks, traffic accidents and crimes.”