Thanks to Paul O’Malley for forwarding this article by Scott Allen in the Pulaski County Journal and Independent. Pulaski County had originally requested Central Time like many of its neighbors. At the time of the request, the time zone map looked like this:
The counties in dark grey represent counties already in Central Time. The counties in red represent those that requested Central Time. The U.S. Dept. of Transportation preliminarily denied many county requests, resulting in a map that looked like this:
The preliminary determination left out Pulaski County as well as a number of other counties in the area. The folks from Pulaski County were mostly content with this, since their primary objective was to be on the same time as their neighbors. Marshall, Fulton, Cass, and White weren’t going to be on Central Time either. So, they didn’t push to have the USDOT reconsider. But reconsider it did, rescinding its preliminary decision to move St. Joseph County, but also rescinding its preliminary decision not to move Pulaski County, creating a final map that looks like this:
According to the article, the people of Pulaski County are mad at the decision of the Dept. of Transportation and are going to meet on Feb. 6 to consider their options. I think pretty much their only option is to submit a new petition to get themselves moved back, though I wouldn’t think the USDOT would have much interest in such a petition at this point.
Certainly Pulaski County could have rescinded their CT petition any time before the final decision was made. Maybe too much assuming and not enough awareness of what could happen.What are county commissioners for?
I strongly disagree with trying to pin this on the Pulaski County Commissioners. How were Pulaski County’s commissioners supposed to read the mind of the USDOT? If South Bend had gone Central like the USDOT’s preliminary report suggested, perhaps Pulaski County would now be happy with Central. The surrounding counties of Marshall, Fulton, Cass, and White had, like Pulaski, been preliminarily denied. The newspaper article suggests that Pulaski was happy to go the same direction as those counties went. It was entirely logical for Pulaski to presume that it would be treated the same way as those preliminarily denied counties. But, it wasn’t. It got put in Central while the others were put in Eastern.
The State and the Feds gave the county officials a screwed up system to work with. Too many moving parts over which county commissioners had no control made it so that the commissioners of a particular county could not make a rational choice or plan. What was best for them depended on what happened in other counties. There was no way for them to know what was going to happen in other counties. They were forced to guess, and, unfortunately they guessed wrong. They guessed that the USDOT would treat preliminarily denied counties pretty much the same.
I think the biggest flaw in the process was too much emphasis on CT vs ET and not enough on which counties wanted to stay with which other counties, and Pulaski county is a casuality of that.Whose fault was that? How DOT responds to Pulaski county might tell us how fair they think the process has been,and how much symphathy they will have with any other county, or group of counties, who still feel they are on the ‘wrong time’.Cant we assume USDOT hopes ‘time’ is settled in Indiana for the forseeable future?
I certainly agree that the process was flawed. The General Assembly should not have tried to separate the issue of Daylight Saving Time from that of time zones — the two are inextricably linked.
Next, the inadequate initial petition for hearings submitted by Governor Daniels did not set the stage for statewide consideration of time zones.
Finally, the USDOT’s decision (on its own, more or less) to solicit county-by-county petitions was maybe the best it could do under the circumstances, but was also flawed. Also, its decision not to consider moving non-petitioning counties if moving them was in the best interests of commerce was a mistake.
I think you’re right that the USDOT would love to think time is settled in Indiana, and I would suspect it will be reluctant to re-open the issue for any individual county in the near future.
I put the big blame on Governor Daniels and the General Assembly who passed the half-baked DST legislation that did not address the time zone issue. They did it because they could not pass DST if they were up front about the time zone consequences of their actions. In this case, half a loaf is worse than none.
As with any issue those yelling the loudest are those whose cart has been upset. I suspect that the residents of NE Pulaski County in the Culver School system are the ones protesting loudest at the moment. On the other hand the DOT did present reasoning for moving Pulaski, for example its placement by the State in the same region with other NW Indiana counties for workforce and economic development. While the workforce Pulaski exports to surrounding counties is almost evenly split between the new CTZ and the ETZ, the portion commuting to Lake, Porter, Starke and LaPorte has been growing much faster than to other areas. I do not expect that the Commissioners meeting next week will be as one sided, pro ET, as the instant reaction suggests. Southern Lake County and Porter County are becoming a major economic center and their influence is spreading.