Ohio bill advanced to observe daylight saving time permanently

COLUMBUS, Ohio ( WCMH ) — A bipartisan Ohio bill to urge observing daylight saving time permanently has taken another step forward at the Statehouse after passing the House last year.

Concurrent Resolution 7 was considered in a Senate General Government Committee hearing late last month, marking the first time the bill has been debated at the Statehouse since the legislation passed the House in December. If enacted, the resolution would urge the U.S. Congress to pass the “Sunshine Protection Act,” a bill to transition to perpetual daylight saving nationwide.

Reps. Rodney Creech (R-West Alexandria) and Bob Peterson (R-Sabina), the bill’s primary sponsors, argued during the June hearing that the U.S. no longer needs the biannual tradition of changing clocks. The lawmakers pointed to various studies that say moving clocks forward in the spring and back in the fall causes a number of work, school, safety and sleep-related issues.

“Continuing to change the time results in a higher number of cardiac issues and strokes and prolonged seasonal depression,” Creech said. “A recent study revealed that sleep loss, even for as little as one hour, can decrease a child’s quality of life, showing significant negative impacts on the children’s physical well-being as well as their ability to cope with the school environment.”

One study said adult workers on average sleep 40 minutes less, have 5.7% more workplace injuries, and lose 67.6% more work days because of injuries the day following the spring shift than on other days. Another, after researching 21 years of fatal accidents in the U.S., found a significant increase in accidents on the Monday following the spring forward and another increase on the Sunday after the fall back.

However, Jay Pea, president of the nonprofit Save Standard Time, said in a previous hearing last year that daylight saving would delay Ohio’s sunrise past 8 a.m. for more than four months, sometimes as late as 9:06 a.m., and noted Ohio rejected an effort in 1974 to enact daylight saving permanently. Rather, Pea advocates for extending standard time to the entire year.

“Permanent standard time would protect start times for schoolchildren and essential workers by letting most sleep naturally past dawn year-round. Its benefits to circadian health would improve immunity, longevity, mood, alertness, and performance in school, sports, and work,” Pea said. “Standard time is the natural clock, set to the sun.”

Creech and Peterson noted, while daylight saving was instituted during World War I to conserve power, a 2008 Australian study found adjusting clocks twice a year does not reduce electricity consumption after all. Rather, researchers found the time change only caused a “shift in demand consistent with activity patterns that are tied to the clock rather than sunrise and sunset.”

“Changing clocks twice a year did not save any power at all, nor did it lead to behavioral change as people do not adjust their schedules based on outdoor lighting,” Peterson said. “Instead, those researchers found that modern schedules are fixed to clocks, not the sun.”

The lawmaker’s resolution notes an effort to enact daylight saving in Ohio would be curtailed until federal law changes. Under the Uniform Time Act of 1966, states can change to standard time but not daylight saving, which requires a change to federal law to transition to perpetual daylight saving.

Passing the Sunshine Protection Act would mean later sunsets in the winter, but also later sunrises. For example, the sun rises around 7:15 a.m. and sets around 4:30 p.m. on the first day of winter in New York. The Sunshine Protection Act would change sunrise to 8:15 a.m. and sunset to 5:30 p.m.

While many other states have also hinted at permanently observing daylight saving, states like New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Tennessee want to observe standard time. Six in 10 Americans, 61%, would do away with the nation’s twice-a-year time change while a little over one-third, 35%, want to keep the current practice, according to a Monmouth University poll.

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