Local legislator wants to stop daylight savings time

By Lauren Pack, Staff Writer 12:37 PM Friday, March 9, 2012

COLUMBUS — Most residents across the nation will spring forward to Daylight Savings Time early Sunday morning, but State Rep. Courtney Combs, R- Ross Twp., wants the practice to become a thing of the past.

Combs said Friday he will introduce legislation to repeal Daylight Savings Time in Ohio, and keep the state on standard time throughout the year.

“It is time to retire this World War I era antique” Combs said. “Daylight Savings Time is a perfect example of a government policy far outliving its usefulness and continuing simply because that’s the way it has always been done. While it may have made sense when the government was fighting a war, it has no place in a modern world. Nowadays, all it does is inconvenience people twice a year”

Under the federal Uniform Time Act of 1966, a state can move off daylight savings by passing legislation at the state level.

Currently, the states of Hawaii and Arizona, as well as all the American insular territories (Guam, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands) do not utilize Daylight Savings Time. In recent years, efforts have been put forth in Alaska, Colorado, and Florida to eliminate the time change.

Originally put forth as a wartime conservation effort to save fuel by reducing the need to use artificial lighting, recently doubts have grown about the environmental effectiveness of Daylight Savings Time with regards to saving energy, according to Combs. Studies done by the National Bureau of Standards have found no discernible energy savings from the time shift. As a result of examining utility bills in jurisdictions that have moved back and forth between daylight savings and year-long standard time have actually shown that the time shift increased electricity consumption.

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