Apparently the conferees signed off on a compromise version of the DST Bill: Filed House Conference Committee Report, Senate Bill 0127. This happened only after Speaker Bosma removed Representative Crooks (D-Washington) as a conferee and replaced hiim with Representative Borror (D-Fort Wayne). According to this article Representative Crooks said:
81 percent of constituents in his southwestern Indiana district oppose Eastern Daylight Time, and the state should seek federal hearings on possible time zone changes before considering statewide daylight time.
“The reason we don’t have a consensus on this issue is because Hoosiers don’t have a consensus on this issue,†Crooks said.”
The bill will go to the Senate Rules Committee and, if it passes there, it will get a full vote in the Senate and the House. The Conference Committee amends the original by removing the provision that required signs to be erected on highways alerting drivers to the fact that they were entering a new time zone and by removing the provision that would allow county executives to exempt their counties from Daylight Saving Time. The bill is also changed so that both the legislature and the governor petition the U.S. Dept. of Transportation to hold hearings on changing portions of Indiana to Central Time, advising that those counties already in Central Time should change to Central Time and that Clark, Dearborn, Floyd, Harrison, and Ohio Counties should all remain on Eastern Time.
On a personal note, I hadn’t realized how far east the Central Time Zone stretches. However, on vacation, I drove I-65 about 800 miles south from Lafayette, IN to Mobile, AL and with the exception of Louisville, KY, I believe my entire journey (more or less headed due South) outside of Indiana was in the Central Time Zone. If you take a look at this time zone map you can see that the eastern border of Alabama is at roughly the same longitude as the eastern border of Indiana. The entire state of Alabama is in the central time zone. I’m not generally inclined to follow the lead of Alabama on things, but purely in terms of geography and our longitudinal situation, it seems fairly clear that Indiana should be in the central time zone if we insist on observing Daylight Saving Time. (Of course, as I’ve said before, I think we’re a bit too far east for CST and a bit far west for EDT, so we should just stay on Eastern Standard Time year around.)
Leave a Reply