Just a thought on DST

I know, I know. It’s all-DST-all-the-time with me. But a thought occurs to me as I re-read Mary Beth Schneider’s Indy Star Article entitled Time-change bill takes surprise turn. One of the changes Rep. Grubb’s bill made to the Daylight Saving Time (DST) legislation was to make it effective starting April 2006 rather than June 5, 2005 as originally proposed by Rep. Torr. A later start date seems to make sense to me. After all, the economic development argument is that out-of-state businesses just don’t locate here because changing their business sytems to accommodate Hoosier Standard Time (HST) is too burdensome. Asking thousands of Hoosier businesses to change their business systems by June 5 would, by that logic, seem pretty unreasonable. However, Rep. Torr is reportedly going to try to push the start date back to June 5, 2005. I wonder if he and DST supporters are worried about a potentially nasty electoral backlash at this. The state seems fairly evenly divided between pro-DST and pro-HST factions. However, I don’t see anyone voting for a candidate because they enacted Daylight Saving Time. I can certainly see a fair number of rabid HST supporters who will discard other issues and vote against a legislator solely based on the legislator’s support of Eastern Daylight Time. If that potential backlash is likely, I can see where Rep. Torr would like to get the switch accomplished ASAP to give DST opponents time to forgive, forget, and get used to it. If they have to go messing with their clocks and possibly have their business systems screw up in April ’06 — that’s awfully close to election season. A primary challenger could certain make a lot of hay out of the issue. And it may still be relatively fresh in people’s minds come November ’06, shortly after the switch back to standard time in October.