The Palladium-Item has a story on Rep. Pflum’s Internet survey over whether Hoosiers favor DST.

The article states:

Daniels asserts that not observing daylight-saving time is a handicap for Hoosier businesses because businesses outside of Indiana many times do not know what time zone Indiana is in. If daylight-saving times were observed, east-central Indiana would spring forward one hour in the spring and fall back one hour in the fall with the Eastern time zone, while areas like Lake County near Chicago would spring forward and fall back in the Central time zone all year long.
“… The time has come to stop penalizing Indiana businesses through
our quirky treatment of time itself,” he said in his State of the State
Address last week.

First, see a previous entry for information suggesting there is really no evidence that the lack of DST hurts Indiana business. Second, if Indiana is still going to have at least two time zones for patches of the Region and Southwestern Indiana, I’m not sure foreign businesses are going to be any more aware of what time it is in a given part of Indiana.

An Indy Star article about Daylight Saving Time (DST) entitled Is it really costing Indiana businesses?: The jist is that pro-DST business types who were asked couldn’t offer any numbers or say that Indiana would have any more jobs if it went onto DST, but they’re “just sure” it’s costing Indiana jobs.

I think it’s just an annoyance to corporation doing business nationally. But, they figure it out for Central Time, Mountain Time, Eastern Time, and Western Time, there’s no reason they can’t figure it out for Hoosier Standard Time. It’s simply not that difficult. But, the message is that Indiana is not important enough to them to waste an extra half-second of thought on. If we were a booming economy, businesses would be tripping all over themselves to bow and scrape to our little time oddity. That they are trying to change our time-keeping system is a sign of disrespect. If we accommodate them, we’re not going to have any more jobs. We will just have scrapped a time system that makes sense for our geographic area, put our kids out in the dark to wait for school buses, so that a middle-manager somewhere doesn’t have to expend an extra half-second’s worth of thought on arranging his conference call. No thanks.

Apparently two of my favorite Indiana legislators agree with my previous analysis of why Daylight Savings Time has had such a hard time passing in previous incarnations of the Indiana General Assembly.

Republican Senator Richard Bray and Democratic Bloomington Mayor Mark Kruzan (formerly Majority Leader in the Indiana House) basically agree that it’s failed before because of the geographic reality of Indiana’s situation. We’re at the extreme western edge of eastern time or the extreme eastern edge of central time.

(Just as an aside, both of these guys are really extraordinary public servants. I’ve had the opportunity to work with both of them (briefly) and they are both intelligent, deliberate, and approachable. One tendency I noticed while working for the legislature was for the legislators to get way too busy and not really seem to pause to consider what, exactly, they were legislating. Neither of these gentlemen succumbed to that tendency, at least not as far as I could see.)

Introduced Version, House Bill 1034 This bill repeals the legislation Indiana passed way back when that exempts Indiana from the Daylight Savings Time provisions. So, knowing what it does requires some knowledge of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s regulations on daylight savings time. I don’t have that.

But, my best guess is that Indiana is in the Eastern time zone. USDOT doesn’t allow the state to be split, otherwise, some of Indiana would more naturally be in the Central Time Zone. In fact, the legislation being repealed says that the part of Indiana that would fall in the Central Time Zone would observe daylight savings time if the state could be split.

If this passes, then folks in Gary and East Chicago won’t be able to share Chicago’s time, and folks in Covington and Attica will find that in April, it won’t be getting light out until 9 a.m. or so and won’t be getting dark out until 10pm in June. On the other hand, I guess the folks in the eastern part of the state will be happier. This has been the basic problem with daylight savings time legislation in the past. The state splits about 50/50 as to whether to have it or not. Most folks who think about it have a fairly strong opinion one way or the other. The folks who are in favor of it are divided between Eastern time and Central time, so they have been losing the fight for decades. Now, we have one party rule and a governor who apparently thinks it’s a good idea, so maybe it has a chance.