Nancy Sulok has an excellent column in the South Bend Tribune, taking Gov. Daniels to task for the hash he has made of the time zone issue.
Gov. Mitch Daniels, who has spent almost half his life living in the elite East, created a mess with his lack of understanding of Indiana.
Indiana is not the East; it is the Midwest. If we want the sun to be overhead at noon, as nature intended, we need to be on Central time. That’s a fact, and it applies to the whole state, not just a few select counties.
It’s a basic concept of natural law that even Daniels, with his Princeton education, should understand.
All of that book-learning failed to teach the guv’ner good old Midwestern common sense. If it had, he would have known better than to mess with Indiana clocks.
Born in Pennsylvania, Daniels has acted more like a bumbling Keystone Kop than a down-home Hoosier.
He has taken stands on every side of the time issue. During the campaign for governor in 2004, he said he was in favor of Central time, because it would place Indiana within two hours of every other time zone in the country.
After winning the election, he said he was undecided between Central and Eastern, but the people of Indiana should decide. More recently, he indicated that St. Joseph County should not make a decision contrary to Elkhart County. In other words, we should go Eastern.
Is that how Republicans lead?
The rest of the column is worth a read as well. Interestingly, she mentions that Rep. Dave Crooks is the author of HB 1014. She must be on the inside track — the LSA website does not have anything available other than HB 1001. Apparently, it would place the following question on the November 2006 election ballot:
“Should Indiana petition the federal government to place all of Indiana in the Central time zone except Clark, Dearborn, Floyd, Harrison and Ohio counties?”
Personally, I think the exception language should be removed. With that referendum question, you’re still talking about a split time zone. The argument for one time zone in the state is much more compelling, in my opinion, if you actually only have one time zone in the state. Whoever gets the time line is going to be upset. But, in a state that is only 140 miles wide, the state line makes more sense than somewhere in the middle of the state. Besides, the folks in those counties have shown (like their governor) a certain indifference to the time zone law. They’ve been observing Daylight Saving Time illegally for the past 30 years.
Leave a Reply