Daylight saving time year-round?

Posted 12/22/16

The United States observes standard time between November and March. In March, clocks are set forward an hour, offering an extra hour of daylight on summer evenings.

But state Rep. Dan Laursen, R-Powell, thinks the one-hour time changes are a …

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Daylight saving time year-round?

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Powell lawmaker seeks to change time

A Powell lawmaker hopes to get Wyoming to end its twice-a-year routine of springing forward and falling back an hour by making daylight saving time last all year.

The United States observes standard time between November and March. In March, clocks are set forward an hour, offering an extra hour of daylight on summer evenings.

But state Rep. Dan Laursen, R-Powell, thinks the one-hour time changes are a difficult adjustment for workers, the elderly, children and others.

“I think it affects a lot of people,” Laursen said.

A bill he’s drafted for the upcoming Legislative session, House Bill 49, asserts that “the biannual change of time between Mountain Standard Time and Mountain Daylight Saving Time is disruptive to commerce and to the daily schedules of the residents of the state of Wyoming.”

Last year, Laursen proposed solving the problem with a bill that would have eliminated daylight saving time. However, that bill never made it to the floor for consideration in the budget session (“The speaker (of the House) wasn’t real excited about it, I don’t think,” Laursen said.) The lawmaker also heard from many people who preferred to keep daylight saving time.

“Everybody wanted that hour in the summertime to play golf and to garden; those were the comments I’m hearing,” Laursen said.

So, his new bill would do the opposite of what he proposed a year ago: keep daylight saving time and scrap standard time.

“The residents and businesses of the state of Wyoming have become more habituated to the eight months of daylight saving time per year than the four months of standard time per year,” Laursen says in the bill.

The Casper Star-Tribune said the change would take federal approval and a multi-step process that would involve Wyoming technically switching to Central Standard Time.

Laursen said most people he hears from support the concept, but others want to know why he’s even trying the bill, which he acknowledges is “controversial.”

A man from Casper called Laursen Wednesday to tell the lawmaker not to forget about the time change’s effect on pets. “He said, ‘The dog wants to be a fed an hour earlier because they changed that damn clock,’” Laursen recounted with a laugh.

He expects one of the most frequent complaints with his idea will be that children will leave for school in the dark each morning, but “kids go to school in the dark, anyway; they’ll come home in the light more, if it did (pass).”

Laursen said he doesn’t know how far his bill will go in the upcoming session; he thinks it’d be better to make a nationwide change, “but I don’t know if you’d ever get that done.”

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