The Indy Star has an article entitled Many back Central time at 2nd hearing for counties.
Sounds like it went much like the first, a lot of passionate Central Time supporters sprinkled with a few Eastern Time supporters. Judy Kaleta, the Transportation Department’s representative who is on a magical mystery tour of Indiana time zone zealots has to be wondering who she pissed off at the United States Dept. of Transportation to get this assignment.
The most entertaining quote from the piece:
Ron Mott, a morning radio personality with WAXI in Terre Haute, took to the Hulman Center meeting-room floor like a preacher delivering a fiery sermon on the evils of Eastern time.
“I don’t think I should have to be on the same time as Bangor, Maine,” Mott bellowed, hardly needing the hand-held microphone each speaker was given. “I can spit and hit Illinois. But on the same time as Bangor, Maine? Now how smart is that?”
Another salient point was made by “Vincent Lundstrom, a retiree from Terre Haute, [who] was frustrated by a process that meant no matter how many of his fellow Vigo County residents asked for Central time, that change wouldn’t be considered. Vigo County’s commissioners did not petition for a change, so the federal government will leave the county in the Eastern time zone along with most of the state.”
As I’ve mentioned before, the USDOT has unnecessarily placed that restriction on itself. There was no legal requirement that the USDOT confine its inquiry only to petitioning counties.
Update The Indy Star has an editorial entitled “It’s About Time, It’s About Jobs”. First of all, I have serious doubts that alterations to our time struggles will add a single job to Indiana. And, if we were really concerned with jobs above all else, we wouldn’t be entertaining the idea of diluting our science classes with Intelligent Design philosophy/religion/superstition (depending on the implementation), and we wouldn’t be reinforcing the country’s notion that we’re culturally backward by announcing our hostility to gays through Constitutional Amendment. All that aside, however, and accepting the Indy Star’s premise that “fixing” the time issue will actually add jobs for Hoosiers; the Star doesn’t make an argument for why eastern time does more to add jobs than Central Time. It simply makes the assertion:
For a few counties in northwestern and southwestern Indiana, joining their neighbors on Central time makes good economic sense. For most of Indiana, however, the Eastern time zone holds the best opportunities.
Thank you, O omniscient editorial board, for sparing us from the evidence of this self-evident fact which would doubtless confuse our small minds. But, in fact, there is a convincing economic argument to the contrary. developed by mathematician Jeff Sagarin, and Indiana University Kelley School of business professors F. Robert Jacobs, and Wayne Winston. Indiana’s “economic time zone†lies squarely in the central zone. It assumes that we want to maximize the business to be done by Indiana firms with the other states in the six time zones of this country: Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Alaskan, Hawaiian and Aleutian. It also assumes that potential business in a region is proportional to the population of that region. And it then assumes that the “coverage” of that region is proportional to the number of common hours of the business day that Indiana would share with that region. The reasoning being that the number of hours of common business hours is the number of hours when you can do business with that time zone. The current geographic population center of the United States is in the Central Time Zone and it continues to shift westward.
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