Posted on 04/29/2005 5:24:20 AM PDT by Military family member
House passes daylight-saving time bill Updated 12:23a.m. Friday, April 29
By Mike Smith/Associated Press/Indianapolis
The Indiana House gave final legislative approval Thursday to make all of Indiana join 47 other states in observing daylight-saving time, capping three decades of contentious debate.
Proponents of the clock change, who failed to win passage of the bill earlier in the day, cheered wildly after it passed 51-46 on a second tally taken shortly after 11:30 p.m. EST. It passed the Senate 28-22 on Wednesday and now heads to Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, who made it a top priority and is sure to sign it.
The law would take effect next April, when all states except most of Arizona and all of Hawaii would again observe the time change.
House Speaker Brian Bosma held the voting board open for several minutes during the second vote until Rep. Troy Woodruff, a freshman Republican from Vincennes, supplied the 51st "yea" needed for passage. Bosma then closed the machine and announced the bill's passage.
"I can tell you that the rest of the nation, the rest of the world, knows that Indiana doesn't get it," Bosma said during debate. "Now is the day to tell the rest of the world that we are willing to step into the 21st century."
Woodruff voted against the bill earlier and initially cast a no vote Thursday night. His district borders Illinois and a pocket of counties in southwestern Indiana that are in the Central time zone and observe daylight time. Many residents in the western parts of Indiana oppose Eastern daylight time, since it would put them an hour ahead of their Central time neighbors all year.
Woodruff said he changed his vote because the issue had become too partisan and he wanted to move on to bigger matters such as the two-year state budget. He suggested that his vote might be politically risky, but said he was prepared to return home and explain his vote to constituents.
"Some things are more important than re-election," he said.
Daniels spokeswoman Jane Jankowski said the governor spoke with top House sponsors by phone after the vote and extended his gratitude to supporters. "It's a great day," Jankowski said.
Efforts to make the time switch have failed more than two dozen times since most of the state's 92 counties opted out of the time change under state and federal legislation passed in the early 1970s. Its path to passage was rough and rocky all session long, but Daniels lobbied hard for the bill because he said it would eliminate confusion and boost commerce. Dozens of businesses and their lobbying groups backed the bill, saying the current system causes mix-ups over airline flights, delivery times and conference calls.
The House voted 49-48 against the bill earlier Thursday. That vote, however, did not kill the legislation because it takes a constitutional majority of 51 votes to pass a bill or defeat one outright. Seventy-seven counties in the Eastern time zone portion of Indiana remain on standard time year round, while five in southeastern Indiana ignore state and federal law and change their clocks. Five counties each in the northwest and southwest pockets of the state are in the Central zone and observe daylight time.
The legislation would require that Daniels and the General Assembly petition the U.S. Department of Transportation, which regulates times zones, to hold hearings to determine if more Indiana counties should be moved to the Central zone.
The request would have to be made within days of Daniels' signing the bill, and he has said the hearing process could begin within months.
Republican Rep. Jerry Torr of Carmel, the bill's primary sponsor in the House, argued for the time change, saying the state hurts itself by not following the same time as most of the country.
"We put up a roadblock that shouldn't be there," Torr said. Adoption of daylight time "is a signal to the rest of the world that we are ready to do business."
dblock that shouldn't be there," Torr said. Adoption of daylight time "is a signal to the rest of the world that we are ready to do business."
Has Bush indicated whether or not he's in favor of the expansion of DST in the energy bill?
That I haven't heard. How would it work?
I'd be ticked if I lived in Indiana. Daylight savings time sucks.
Living outside of DST when everyone else is on it sucks.
Basically the proposal is to expand DST by two months by starting in March and ending in November.
Gonna need a patch to a bunch of software ;)
And another bit of texture in our national character is lost in the pursuit of the Holy Grail of bland conformity.
If Washington DC demanded that all clocks run backward on Fridays, half the states would immediately work on rewiring clock motors without giving it a second thought.
I still say, for the record, that Indiana turn its clocks ahead 25 hours instead of 1 hour, then we'll be a day ahead of the world
I work for a transportation company that makes two runs from Iowa to Indy every day. The time differences cause a lot of confusion and missed connections. Of course just about the time everyone gets used to it, it changes.
I want to see those laws enforced,
Why in the world are we in the same time zone as NY, Boston, Miami, and DC, rather than Chicago?
This is from the state that boasts the university that gave us both B.F. Skinner and lab rat mazes and the Kinsey report.
Go figure
Welcome to the party, Hoosiers!
My wife's originally from Richmond, IN - she liked not having to worry about DST while she was there.
Under the proposal, Daylight Savings Time would be in effect for more than half the year, and would become the new "normal". Maybe we can call Wintertime "Daylight Wastings Time" or something...
I live in Terre Haute, right on the boarder and 1/3 of my staff and my customes live in Illinois. It's going to make a lot of work for me.
But it will bring us new business. It will just flood into the state now. Businesses that have no trouble conducting business with other business in Europe or Asia but can't get the time in Indiana.
Sounds like half the state wants to be on Illinois time and the other half on Ohio, eastern time.
The state seems rather split 50/50.
This may not be a problem elsewhere where time zone borders are much less populated. Much of the central to mountain time zone split is sparsly populated. Same from mountain to pacific. But eastern to central is most populated in Indiana.
ie daylight vs standard is more of a central vs eastern change, that toggles in April and October.
I will be ticked if they make us change to Chicago time. We are just as economically tied to Cincinnati and New York as we are Chicago--even more so in my case. I don't want it to be daylight at 4:00 am and dark at 4:00 pm when the kids walk home from school. It's next to impossible to get anything done outside in the evening after work. When I was a kid we could play outside until late in the evening. If it gets dark even earlier, the kids will have even less outside time. It's no wonder they are all couch potatoes. They can't play out after dark.
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