Daylight Saving Time Ends In CA: What About Sunshine Protection Act?

CALIFORNIA — It looked hopeful earlier this year that Sunday, Nov. 6, would roll around, and California residents would finally be done with the twice-a-year clock changing that goes with the switch back and forth between standard and daylight saving time.

Alas, we will “fall back” at least one more time. Daylight saving time officially ends at 2 a.m. on Nov. 6, and unless something happens in Congress to change it, we’ll return to daylight saving time on Sunday, March 12, 2023.

State legislatures have been volleying the issue back and forth for years.

Most have considered some legislation on daylight saving time, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Since 2015, at least 350 bills and resolutions have been introduced in virtually every state, whether establishing daylight saving or standard as the year-round time.

California is one of 19 states that has enacted legislation or passed resolutions to provide year-round daylight saving time. While the Golden State's Proposition 7 did pass in 2018 — garnering support from 60 percent of voters — it also required a two-thirds vote from the State Senate. That vote never happened since states do not have the power to enact year-round daylight saving time. That authority rests in the federal government.

In March, there was a national push to make daylight saving time permanent. The movement was "tremendously exciting," Kansen Chu told Patch on March 16.

Chu, a former Bay Area Assemblyman, co-authored and managed to pass one of the first known bills to oust the practice.

"We have so many reasons to abandon this antiquated practice," Kansen said. "It causes health issues, there's some scientific proof that it increases heart attack rates, work-related accidents and it's also a pubic safety issue."

Back in 2017, Kansen did extensive research to co-author Prop 7 with Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego). The idea of switching the clocks was originally created to accommodate farmers to offer more daylight hours to work in the field, Kansen said.

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"I talked to the farmers and they just laughed and said 'you know, we get up when we need and we'll quit when we have to do and it has nothing to do with the clock,'" he said.

Daylight saving time is observed across the United States, except in Hawaii and most of Arizona, which opted out of the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which mandated daylight saving time. States are allowed to vote to make standard time permanent, but not DST.

Any changes to the practice would have to be approved by Congress, which doesn’t know yet what, if anything, it will do about daylight saving time. You may recall the U.S. Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act earlier this year, delighting a majority of Americans annoyed by the ritual of springing forward and falling back.

As the proposed legislation stands now, year-round daylight saving time would take effect in November 2023, assuming it passes the House and President Joe Biden signs it. Hawaii and, for the most part, Arizona are exempted from the current law on daylight saving time and would be in the proposed legislation as well.

No action has been taken on the House version of the legislation to make daylight saving time permanent, and it’s unlikely to until lawmakers can come to agreement on a fundamental question:

Which should it be, year-round daylight saving time, as the Senate version stipulates, or year-round standard time, which some lawmakers in rural states prefer?

“I can’t say it’s a priority,” U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., the New Jersey Democrat who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told The Hill earlier this year.

Those priorities include dealing with inflation, which hasn’t been this high since 1981; securing enough votes in the House to pass a federal assault weapons ban and other issues related to gun violence in America; and codifying rights, such as same-sex marriage and abortion when a mother’s life is threatened, put in jeopardy when the conservative U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

“We continue to try to come up with a consensus but so far, it’s eluded us,” Pallone told The Hill. “The problem is that a lot of people say to me, ‘Oh, we should just have, you know, we shouldn’t switch back and forth, we should just have standard or daylight saving,’ but then they disagree over which one to enact. And so that’s the problem. We need a consensus that if we’re gonna have one time, what is it? And I haven’t been able to get a consensus on that.”

Pallone’s remarks aren’t surprising.

After the Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine asked the House panel to take a step back and take a thoughtful look at the pros and cons of both options, saying the group didn’t get a chance to debate the merits of the proposal before it was rushed through the Senate late last winter.

“If we can get this passed, we don’t have to do this stupidity anymore,” Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who sponsored the legislation, said at the time. “Pardon the pun, but this is an idea whose time has come.”

The sleep medicine group pointed to research showing the sudden switch from standard to daylight saving time on the second Sunday in March is associated with significant public health and safety risks. Among them: An increase in heart attacks, mood disorders and motor vehicle crashes.

“Current evidence best supports the adoption of year-round standard time, which aligns best with human circadian biology and provides distinct benefits for public health and safety,” the group said, adding its statement had been endorsed by more than 20 medical, scientific and civic organizations.

Daylight saving time from spring to early fall became the national standard in the 1960s when Congress passed the Uniform Time Act.

The United States has tried year-round daylight saving time twice before, the first time from 1942-1945 in an effort to conserve fuel during World War II. A daylight saving time trial in 1974 lasted only about 10 months before Congress, facing widespread public criticism, voted to undo the change.

Some of the same arguments are being made today.

Although year-round daylight saving time would talk on an extra hour of daylight in the late afternoon and early evening during the fall and winter months, it would mean many of America’s children would be getting to school in the dark.

Consider the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. On Dec. 21, 2023, sunrise in New York City is 7:17 a.m. and sunset is 4:30 p.m. With the proposed law in effect, sunrise wouldn’t be until 8:17 a.m. and sunset would be pushed to 5:30 p.m.

In Seattle, year-round daylight saving time would push sunrise on the date of the 2023 winter solstice to 8:55 a.m. and sunset to 5:20 p.m.

A CBS News/YouGov poll in April found that 46 percent of Americans want year-round daylight saving time, 33 percent favor year-round standard time and 21 percent want to leave things as they are. That poll found older Americans were slightly more inclined than younger people to prefer year-round daylight saving time. Support for year-round daylight time was highest in the Northeast, Midwest and South.

A Monmouth University Poll a month earlier found two-thirds of Americans want to do away with the clock re-setting practice. About 44 percent prefer making daylight saving time permanent, while 13 percent favor year-round standard time.

Those polls compare to an Associated Press/National Opinion Research Center poll in 2019 that found 40 percent of Americans want year-round standard time, compared with 31 percent who prefer daylight saving time all year and 28 percent who want to keep changing their clocks.