An editorial in the Evansville Courier Press weighs in on the Knox County deliberations as to whether to re-petition the USDOT for a switch back to Eastern Time. They suggest that Knox County give Central Time a chance before filing a new petition. I like that the Courier Press gave us a refresher course on how the counties were dragged into this mess:
That no-win situation – dark in the evening or dark in the morning – is indicative of the time mess that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels stepped into, and then exacerbated, last year when he took office. As a candidate, he pushed for statewide daylight-saving time and for all of the state to be in one zone; he said he preferred Central.
He got his daylight-saving time, but backed off on the time zone issue, leaving multiple counties to fend for themselves with the federal Department of Transportation. It is an unpopular move that Daniels will still be hearing about two years from now, if he runs for re-election.
A slight change of tune on the part of the Courier Press on the DST issue? It was one of the papers that endorsed DST for the ETZ part of the state rather than recognizing that year round standard time was the pin that kept most of the state unified.
I like how he just “stepped in” to the whole mess. Like it was some raging inferno of a problem before he showed up and he just got swept up in it.
Ordinary Hoosiers were just too dumb to understand that the system they thought was working well enough for the past 30 years was actually a raging inferno of a problem that needed to be fixed.