Status Summary
Two bills are active in the Missouri House:
- House Joint Resolution 38 sponsored by Representative Kelly to get voter approval to “switch clocks to daylight saving for the last time and the use of daylight saving time for public purposes will be eliminated” in March 2017.
- House Bill 1135 is sponsored by Representative Delus Johnson has multiple provisions, including establishing a “Daylight Saving as New Standard Time Pact” with other states, as well as exempting the state immediately from DST.
Legislation Intent
HJR 38 proposes to “spring forward” in March 2017, and stay there, effectively going into Year-Round DST. The fact that the legislation says “After this time, daylight saving time will no longer be recognized as the official time of this state” is immaterial.
HB 1135 establishes the “Daylight Saving as New Standard Time Pact”, declares itself the first member of that pact, and invites “any other state desiring to permanently change daylight saving time to a new standard time”. It goes on in a later paragraph to say that when at least ten states have passed legislation to join the “pact”, Missouri (and each of the other states) “shall switch clocks to daylight saving for the last time, and daylight saving time will be eliminated”.
Here at Time Zone Report, I really think legislation “changing the names of times” like going to DST but saying “it’s eliminated” is a really bad way to accomplish this. If you’re going to go onto permanent DST, why not just say so? I just don’t get it.
HB 1135’s middle paragraph says, without any restrictions, that “Missouri hereby exempts all areas of the state from the daylight saving time provisions of 15 U.S.C. Section 260a”, effectively eliminating DST. I don’t know the intent of the sponsor of the bill, but to me, this reads “let’s go off of DST until ten states join the pact, then let’s go back on DST year-round.”
Links to Legislation
Links to Sponsors
Other Information
Posts from this Time Zone Report site
Time Zone Report’s Twitter collection “MO-DST-Legislation”
