Yesterday afternoon I had a 10 minute phone call with a member of the staff from the Office of the General Counsel at the US Department of Transportation. He mentioned my Emails to a couple of members of his staff, where I had requested some information regarding Year-Round Daylight Saving Time and changing state’s Time Zones.<\/p>\n
The staff member agreed to discuss my requests for information on an informal basis, under the advice that this was not official US DOT direction or guidance.<\/p>\n
During our conversation, the staff member confirmed (again, informally) a number of things that Time Zone Report has been advising:<\/p>\n
We also discussed whether or not Congress could be persuaded to change 15 USC 260a and allow states another DST option of “Year-Round DST”.\u00a0 I mentioned the state of Washington’s SCR 1 which requests Congress to make the change, and the staff member replied, “That is how you would do it.\u00a0 Whether they have any appetite to do so, I doubt it.”<\/p>\n
I asked, “If 10 or 12\u00a0or 15 states wrote to Congress to say ‘look, we really want to look into this [concept of Year-Round Daylight Saving Time], at least at that<\/em> point there would be some attention given to it.”\u00a0 He responded with, “I think that’s certainly reasonable. Once they can cite it through their congressional representation, if you start getting that sort of mass, it will get some traction, but … what I really think would happen before that came up is that either DOT or somebody else would be assigned to do a study of that and see what the impact would be.”<\/p>\n So, to states that really think Year-Round DST is a good idea: send an official communication to Congress requesting that they change 15 USC 260a to permit it. That’s the only way to make this happen.<\/p>\n The staff member mentioned Utah’s efforts to move from Mountain to Central when I brought up the topic of changing time zones.\u00a0 He added, “That’s a very ‘heavy lift’ for that state, and I’ve let a couple of people in that state know that already.”<\/p>\n Moving a whole state out of a time zone goes against statutory requirements, and US DOT is mandated by Congress to uphold the statutes<\/a>.\u00a0But at a town or county level that sits on a state border, for example, where the population really operates together with the local jurisdictions in another state that just happen to be in another time zone — this is where the DOT can rule officially to make a time zone switch. See, for example, the most recent action of this sort with Wayne County, Kentucky.\u00a0 Look at this excerpt from an August 2000 issue of the Federal Register<\/a> to see their story (starts near the bottom of the first column, of this 5-page excerpt).<\/p>\n My conversation with the staff member was informative, but revealed nothing contrary to what I already understood.\u00a0 States can do only the following:<\/p>\n End of story.\u00a0 Any other legislation relating to time zones or DST is futile.<\/p>\nChanging Time Zones<\/h1>\n
My Bottom Line<\/h1>\n
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