February 2020

Killer Clocks – The Hotlanta message about Daylight Saving Time

February 26, 2020

Because this effort to fix Daylight Saving Time is basically just me writing blog posts, emailing legislators and talking to people, I never really step back and do any kind of planning or organizing.

I certainly never have marketing meetings to talk about the message.

But yesterday that happened for me in the Georgia state capitol.

And boy did it pay off.

OK, first the message, and then the back story:

Great, eh?

Only took me six years to come up with that. Jeesh.

OK, here’s the backstory:

For a while now I’ve been communicating with Rep. Wes Cantrell in Georgia. Like other legislators around the country, I immediately liked the guy. There are definitely both Democrats and Republicans who care about this, and the thing they always have in common is a tendency toward Good Government and being responsive to their constituents.

He told me the bill was coming up for a crucial hearing, and I have a bunch of frequent flier miles and hotel points, so I told him I’d be happy to fly down to testify. I’m so glad I went, because I got something really valuable in return: A clean, coherent message.

When I go to states to testify, I typically spend some time with the sponsor, and then sometimes there’s some impromptu lobbying, and quite often some talking to reporters. As a former reporter, I’m always happy to do that.

But I never really listen to what I’m saying, I just blurt out as many facts as I can.

Yesterday, however, after the hearing, I got to sit down with Rep. Cantrell and a couple of other people who had been in the hearing room, including his wife. One of those in the room said that when I said one thing, the whole issue really crystalized for him.

The government is in charge of clocks. The clocks are killing people. It’s time to Lock The Clock.

And then one of the reporters who was there featured that snippet in his excellent report from the hearing. (Also, loved the Girl Scouts!) (Also, the local Fox station also did a fantastic story.)

So now I have it.

I got the hashtag #LockTheClock when I testified in Michigan, and now I have, essentially, a vision statement for the movement.

The first line is a given: The government, properly, has an interest in a unified and coherent system for time.

The second line is the gut punch. It may not have been clear when the Uniform Time Act of 1966 passed, but it is crystal clear now that the time change kills people every year.

And the last line is the call to action.

Feel free to share that however you like to share these things.

Thanks to Rep. Cantrell, and all the people I talked to in Georgia, who were as lovely and helpful as could be. Thanks to Noor Younis for the background photo.

And thanks to you for reading this, and helping to get that message out.

This just may be the year!

I’m out of order? You’re out of order! This whole thing is out of order!

February 20, 2020

I testified Monday in Wyoming on a very sensible Daylight Saving Time bill, and it sailed out of committee on an 8-1 vote.

(That one no vote was sort of smiling as he voted no. I think he was fine with it passing. He was distinguished — my way of saying he was really old — and I think he was voting to represent the constituency of people who remember when Standard Time was more common before the Uniform Time Act of 1966.)

My testimony was impromptu, mostly just answering questions. It was a respectful and legitimate conversation on the merits. I was very happy to hear the Farm Bureau testify that it supported the bill. The lobbyist from the bureau alluded to the tortured history that farmers have with Daylight Saving Time, and in a sense he saw this bill as a chance to put all that, finally, to rest.

Yesterday I testified in my home state of Colorado. The last time I testified in Colorado the proceedings were not so respectful as I was personally attacked by members of the House, and I was even told that my comments were out of order. I wanted to stand up, like Al Pacino, and yell: “I’m out of order??? You’re out of order! This whole place is out of order!!!!”

But I didn’t. I just apologized meekly and moved on. That was two years ago.

My plan going into this year was to speak truth to power, and if I got ruled out of order, well, maybe those interested can just read this or watch this video and see what I would have said before I get cut off.

In the end, I didn’t deliver these remarks below exactly. You can read an excellent writeup of what happened from Alex Burness in the Denver Post, but the comments below were the heart of what I wanted to say. What I learned after my testimony made me grow even more cynical about the process. See below for that.

Dear members of the kill committee,

My name is Scott Yates, and I’m the leader of the LockTheClock movement to end the insanity of changing the clocks twice per year.

I’ve testified all over the country on this topic, and the interchange with the lawmakers is always respectful, and very much on the actual topic of the significant health and safety concerns related to the government mandating that the entire population change all the clocks by an hour twice per year. Except in Colorado.

When I testified here in Colorado, I pointed out that the main reason that the ski industry said they were against fixing what is broken with time is that they needed morning sunshine to examine the ski lifts. I suggested that we all pitch in and buy them some flashlights.

That’s when I was ruled out of order.

So I won’t do that today. No way.

After that, I started doing some research, and came to a startling conclusion. In short, the whole “morning light” thing was not the real reason. I don’t know for sure what the real reason is, but I suspect money is involved. Once a ski resort has sold you a lift ticket, it doesn’t make any more money on you the more you ski. It only makes more money if you stop skiing and get into a resteraunt. The only way to get you off the mountain is to make it dark.

But as I sit here today, I don’t actually think the ski industry even cares that much about this issues. Indeed, I think that if you kill this bill today, what is happening is simply a raw expression of power.

I have been working on this issue for six years now, and I pay close attention to what’s happening around the country. Two states—Arizona and Hawaii—have locked the clock in Standard Time. Another 11 states have passed some kind of bill or resolution to stay in Daylight Time year round. Nearly all the rest have some kind of bill working to #LockTheClock. Only six states aren’t doing anything right now.

Also I’m working closely with the office of Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Rob Bishop, both of whom have federal bills that would Lock the Clock, or allow states to do so more easily. Both have lots of bipartisan support, and in this post-impeachment world where legislators are anxious to say that they indeed did get something done and the only way to do so is with a bipartisan bill, both offices are optimistic that they will pass something this year.

But I’d like to draw your attention to five of the states that have passed legislation to fix Daylight Saving Time:

Washington,
Oregon,
California,
Utah, and
Maine.

From Mount Hood and Olympic Valley in the west to Sugarloaf in the east, or Jackson or Park City here in the Mountain Time Zone, there are a lot of ski resorts in those five states.

On Monday one of the 8 Yes votes in Wyoming was the representative whose district includes Jackson. No pushback at all. In the other states with a significant ski industry, absolutely no opposition. Nothing.

Does the sun interact with mountains differently in Colorado than it does in California? Do clocks work differently for skiers in Maine or Oregon?

Which leads me to think that maybe I was wrong, that the ski industry doesn’t really care about getting more people off the mountain and into restaurants? What if they don’t care about this issue that much at all?

Then what are we left with? What possible reason could the ski industry have in wanting to kill this bill year after year?

The only possible explanation I’m left with is that the ski lobbyists are killing this just because they can.

Larry Bird, one of the greats of the game of basketball, would sometimes deliver a hip check or make some unsportsmanlike comment, and not get called for it. Why would he do that? Precisely to show that he was the master in that building.

Similarly, I think the ski lobbyists use this topic simply as a way to flex.

Think about it from this perspective: Let’s say that you are doing a town hall in, say, Aurora, and a constituent stands up and says, “I understand that federal law may change, and we could have had a chance to vote on which time zone we like best, and you voted against giving us, the people who elected you, a voice. Why is that?” And then you respond with your voice trailing off: “The ski industry doesn’t have enough flashlights.”

It is beyond absurd—it is the stuff that turns people off to politics, and especially in this era, that is a shame.

This is good government 101. The government regulates time. The way that it does so right now kills and injures people. There is no partisan angle, just historically bad management of clocks. Previous generations of politicians didn’t fully realize the high cost in life and money that clock-switching caused, but now we do know and yet we do nothing. Why?

Because of some lobbyists? Because of the raw exercise of power under the gold dome?

Imagine yourself again at that town hall, and when that constituent asks, imagine how great it would be for you to say: “You know what, I voted for you. I voted to give you that choice. It cost me politically, but I did it anyway because my job is to govern, and if we can’t even govern the clocks, then what does that say? So I voted to bring some sanity to the clocks, and to give you a chance to be heard.”

So I ask you today: Hold your head up high and vote yes.

Thank you very much.

Postscript: How Democracy Dies, Just a Little

So, that was the testimony that I didn’t give, but my comments included a lot of that, but not the part calling out the lobbyists so directly.

Also, the reason that I had used Aurora as my hypothetical is that I thought the person most likely to buck the party leadership and vote would be Rhonda Fields of Aurora. If you click on that link you’ll see that she’s on the “Kill Committee” also known as “State Affairs.”

And she may have been willing to go her own way on that day. But she wasn’t on that committee on the day that bill was heard.

Colorado is a pretty clean state. We have these great rules that, for example, make it so that every bill gets a hearing. Most states aren’t like that, and bills often just die with no hearing at all.

But there are still ways to kill bills, and one is to assign them to the “state affairs” committee, a group whose mandate is so nebulous and membership so small that it can kill just about anything.

So the ski industry lobbyists worked with the leadership of the State Senate to assign this bill to the kill committee, and then just to make sure it would die, the leadership changed the membership of the committee just for one day.

Yes, just on February 19th, 2020, Sen. Fields was not on that committee, and she was replaced by Sen. Kerry Donovan.

Why Donovan?

Well, for one she’s from Vail. Not just from Vail, her family practically founded the town. She talked about how her brother worked as one of the guys who inspects ski lifts, so she was insulted at my “flashlight” comments.

In short, she was about as reliable of a vote as you could find who would be willing to carry water for the ski industry lobbyists.

I was sunk before I walked into the room.

But the fact that the ski lobbyists had to go to such extreme measures to kill the bill, I think means the gig will soon be up.

And besides, the amendment that we offered was a good one. It didn’t commit Colorado to do anything, just to take a preference poll that will only take effect if the federal law changes. Really, if the ski industry was smart they would agree to it so that they can try to convince Coloradans to stay in Standard Time year round. If daylight time would really mean death and dismemberment of ski employees, they can try to make that case to the voters and see if the voters believe it more than I do. Maybe the voters will buy it, they’ve believed less credible claims than that.

If the ski industry does not make that case, it will be stuck with the federal law, which most likely will be putting us into permanent Daylight Time.

The Denver Post story by Alex Burness was so great, because it put right into print so everyone now knows what was formerly known only by people who hang around the capitol a lot: The ski industry is super powerful in Colorado, and is stopping the legislature from doing what it would otherwise want to do.

Now that the very concept of going against the ski industry is out in the open and being talked about, it’s kind of like the Emperor with No Clothes. It only takes one person saying it publicly, and the gig is up.

Times are changing, and the time is going to be changing.

Model Daylight Saving Time State Legislation for 2020

February 15, 2020

There were two basic approaches through last year to fix DST:

A bill that says the state will go into permanent Daylight Saving Time, either when neighboring states do it, or when it is allowed by the federal government to do so.
A resolution calling on the federal government to allow the states to go into permanent Daylight Saving Time.

This year, we came up with a third approach in Colorado, which is to ask the voters which time zone they prefer once the feds pass an act.

I posted links to model language for all three below.

If you are a legislator currently working on this topic, well, you might consider this third way.

If you want to do it the first way, and think you have the votes to get it enacted… Go for it! (And let me know how I can help.) If you do not have the votes, however, maybe you could amend your current bill with this “Colorado” approach?

It is more substantial than a resolution, and it may help spur the change that we need out of Washington.

Model Daylight Saving Time bills – Neighboring state dependent

Some of the ones that have been enacted are:

You might also check in for the latest on this legislative page because there are a lot of these.

Model DST bills – Waiting on the Feds

The three enacted so far are:

Florida

South Carolina

Tennessee

Model DST resolutions

Utah

Kentucky

Arkansas

And one that I wrote back in 2015.

Third Way: Call for vote of the people before Federal Mandate

This is the complex, but legally sound way to ask for a vote of the people to figure out what permanent time they would prefer in the (likely) event that federal law suddenly takes away the clock-changing.

To download the PDF as created by the legislative lawyers in Colorado, click here.

If you have another approach, or think there is some language that would be helpful to legislators, please contact me.

And Good Luck! This really seems to be the tipping-point year.

DST-Back To The Future solution

February 9, 2020

I knew when I started this journey that fixing Daylight Saving Time would be hard, but I didn’t know about the lawyers.

Or the time travel.

In spite of the fact (or maybe because of the fact) that I was on Comedy Central, this issue is no joke. When I first started on this six years ago, I just wrote my blog posts and hoped for the best.

Now it’s getting real.

Tomorrow afternoon, the Colorado Legislature will once again take up this issue, something I learned about from my daily alerts from BillTrack50.

We’ve had seven states around the country pass legislation, and a couple of dozen others have had bills make some progress.

In Colorado, however, it’s always been the same: The bills die in the first committee they hit. There’s never even that much debate. The ski industry kills them every time. The ski industry representatives never even gave much of a reason for killing the bills. One year they said something about needing the morning light to examine the ski lifts.

I suggested that we all pitch in and buy them some flashlights, and while that made some of the legislators in the room laugh, still… incredibly… the bill died.

I don’t think this is actually that big of an issue for the ski industry, but that industry is so powerful in Colorado that the lobbyists just kill the bills instinctively, like swatting flies.

So I didn’t have much hope for the bill that was offered up this year, especially when I saw that was assigned to what everyone in the statehouse calls the “kill committee.”

The sponsor, however, is a guy named Scott, so that gave me some hope, even though it’s his last name 😉 He agreed to meet me.

Now, here was the weird thing for me: I was meeting with a State Senator, a big shot in any state. And my plan was to go in and tell him that his bill stunk, and that he should throw it out and do something different.

What kind of ego does it take to do that? Huge!

My ego is big, but I didn’t know if it would be big enough. I figured my chance of success was about 20 percent that I could get a guy I’ve never met to take something that he felt passionate enough about to introduce a bill, and instead throw that out and do something that is untested, complex and involves time travel. (More on that in a second.)

But I hadn’t met Sen. Scott.

He invited me into his office, and we had a grand conversation. It turns out that while he does have an ego big enough to put his name on billboards and bumperstickers, he had no ego about his bill. He also knew that it was likely to die in its current form and in front of the Kill Committee, so he was probably a bit more open to suggestion because of that.

I sat down with him and we talked about the current state of Daylight Saving Time, especially about the bills now in front of the U.S. Congress. I told him that of the two bills, the Sunshine Protection Act probably had the best chance of passing.

Daylight Saving Time wonk section

(Feel free to skip over this if you don’t want to get really deep into the sausage-making part of DST legislation, but you’ll miss the time-travel part, so…)

Three things you need to know here:

The Sunshine Protection Act calls for the whole country to go into Daylight Saving Time as soon as it is approved.
The U.S. Congress serves all year long.
The Colorado Legislature only meets in the first part of the year, adjourning in early May.

I’ve been working with the office of Sen. Rubio, the sponsor of the federal bill. Among other things, I’ve been expressing my concern about the enactment of the bill, which is immediate. If the bill passes before the first Sunday of November, that’s it! No more clock changing.

Now, you think I would love that. But here’s the thing… I want a solution that’s really going to last. We’ve had some quick solutions in the past, and they haven’t stuck. I do not want to see that happen again.

So what I would like to see is the European approach: Decide that we are no longer going to have clock-changing, and then give each state a year to decide what time zone it wants to land in permanently.

My hunch is that most states, like most people, will want to end up in what is now Daylight Saving Time, but there could be some exceptions, especially among states along the western edge of their time zones. Indiana and Michigan are probably the two most likely candidates here.

Also, some of the states that are split right now—North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Kentucky—are other good candidates to unify under a single time zone.

Here in Colorado, I’m pretty sure that voters will want to move to permanent Daylight Saving Time, but I’m not sure, and I think the voters should make that decision.

But if Rubio’s bill passes, we will never have the chance to decide. It will just happen. The federal law will change and Colorado will not have a legislature in session to do anything about it, even ask the voters for a preference.

Sen. Scott figured out that from his perspective, this makes the matter rather urgent. He’s a proponent of Permanent DST also, but he also is not crazy about the idea of a federal law coming down on Colorado before we have any chance to have any say at all.

So together we figured out that what should really happen is that we should have a referendum that asks the voters this:

“IF FEDERAL LAW CHANGES TO REPEAL THE ANNUAL ADVANCEMENT OF TIME
COMMONLY KNOWN AS DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME, WHICH OF THE
FOLLOWING OPTIONS DO YOU PREFER FOR THE YEAR-ROUND TIME IN
COLORADO?” EACH ELECTOR MUST HAVE THE OPTION TO SELECT
“STAYING ON STANDARD TIME YEAR-ROUND” OR “STAYING ON DAYLIGHT
SAVING TIME YEAR-ROUND”?

Now if you think that is how I talk, or how Sen. Ray Scott talks, you don’t know us at all. We talk like regular people. But Sen. Scott is indeed a senator, so he asked the legislative drafting office to put what we were talking about into the all-caps, legally proper version you see there.

(Lawyers. We all love to make fun of them, but when we need something legal done, we want a good one, and luckily Colorado has great ones.)

But then the staff lawyer who helped us pointed out the bit about time travel. It goes like this:

The federal bill right now says that it goes into effect as soon as it is signed.
It also allows that any state on permanent Standard Time the day before enactment can stay on that time. (Arizona, Hawaii and Puerto Rico all are on Standard Time right now.)
If Colorado voters choose to stay on Standard Time year round, they only want to do that if the federal bill becomes law and takes away the clock changing.
So they won’t be voting to go on Permanent Standard Time no matter what, only in the event the federal law changes.
That means that Colorado will actually go into Permanent Standard Time on the day before the federal law is enacted.
It could be that the federal law will change after the legislature is out, but before the election.
If that happens, and then in the election Coloradans vote to go on Permanent Standard Time, we will have to—legally if not in reality—travel back in time and declare that we are in Permanent Standard Time on the day before the enactment so that we can follow federal and Colorado law.

As Dr. Emmett Brown might say: “Eureka!”

I did not go to law school, and I’m kind of glad, because I didn’t have to write the language to make that work.

But the lawyers did write it, and Sen. Scott OK’d it, and now it is going to be introduced tomorrow.

It is complex, sure, but if there was an easy solution to figure all this out, someone would have come up with it already, and we wouldn’t be suffering the deadly effects of the clock-switching.

Will this work?

I have to say that I’m hopeful that even the Kill Committee will pass this. And even if it doesn’t, I’ve got four states with sponsors already waiting to get this language so they can look at it for their own states, and those are just the four that wrote to me late last week. I wouldn’t be surprised if a dozen states end up passing something like this during this legislative session.

Why?

It solves several problems:

The problem of which way to go.
Everyone hates the clock changing, but science and popular opinion are at best mixed on the issue of which side is better: Permanent DST or Permanent Standard Time. Most of the polls have leaned toward Permanent DST, but they are usually muddled because they also ask if people want to keep changing twice a year. There is a percentage of people who say they actually like that, although I haven’t met one in real life.
This approach strips everything else away and asks the voters which one they want.
The problem of which way businesses want to go.
People have the power here. The way it has worked is that businesses—often way behind the scenes—have used paid lobbyists to get what they want, which in most cases is the status quo. Now if, for instance, the recreation industries want to make the case that Permanent DST is better, they can do so right out in public and see if they can convince the voters. If the television industry thinks it can make the case that we should not be outside, but be inside on the couch watching TV, they can say that. On TV, even. But they won’t be able to kill bills in some dimly lit bar buying drinks for legislators.
The federal law problem
Every day state legislators have to deal with the consequences of federal laws. This bill solves a problem with coming federal legislation before it even comes. That’s the kind of pro-active thing that states always want to do, but rarely can. In this case, it works.
The when-to-act problem
It is always hard to know when to act as a legislator. They don’t want to solve problems before they exist, but they also don’t want to come so late to a problem that legislation seems like an after-thought. This approach deals with a federal bill before it becomes an issue, and at the same time gives voters a chance to weigh in on an issue that I am certain every legislator has heard from constituents about.

The timing part of this is something I hadn’t really thought of, I got that from Sen. Scott. I just think of this as an effort that I just keep working on, like the people who paint the Golden Gate Bridge from one end to the other and then start all over again.

But Sen. Scott pointed out the timing issue. This may be the only chance the states get to have a say about this issue before it gets yanked away by the feds.

Will this happen?

I will let you know here on this blog when I can, and on my Twitter feed right away.

Wish me luck!

Behind the Scenes: The Daily Show’s bit on Daylight Saving Time

February 1, 2020

As the leader of an admittedly oddball movement like #LockTheClock, I get a lot of weird email.

Most of it is fine.

For instance, every month or so I get a note from someone who just had the best idea ever: Move the clocks a half hour and call it good. They think that I probably never thought of that, that I haven’t heard it 100 times before, and that now I should give up on what I’ve been working on for years and do all the work to make it happen the way they want it to happen.

There was a time that I engaged with those people, but now I just delete.

The rest of the mail is fine. There’s lawmakers from small states or aides to legislators from bigger states. Journalists. People just telling me that they agree and that I should keep going. It’s all great.

So then one day I get a very polite note asking if I’d be interested in talking to a producer from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. At first I thought it was a joke, but the email was actually from TheDailyShow.com, and 10 seconds of searching showed me that the producer was legit.

My first impulse was that I should play it cool, and wait a while before I replied. I did that for 10, maybe 15 seconds.

I wrote back and played it cool, saying: Yes! Love to! Like I’m going to say no.

I ended up talking to two different producers. I had no idea where any of this was leading, but I just told them about all the history, etc. They seemed really interested.

Then they asked if I’d be willing to go to Arizona for a day to get interviewed.

Again… like I’d say no.

They picked up the tab for the flight, and literally apologized that they wouldn’t be able to spring for first class. I thought about acting all indignant, but I’m no actor, and didn’t want to screw it up.

So, I went to a clock shop at the appointed time. You know how anyone can shoot a video anywhere anytime these days? Well, they couldn’t do this kind of video. If you haven’t seen it, the spot is here, or here:

While it looks like I’m just sitting down for a chat, the only way to make the video look that great is with a crew of professionals: Camera operators, a sound person, some sort of director, and then the producer who came from New York City, and of course, Desi Lydic. Every one of them was mellow, funny, hard working, and a total pro. I mean, I think they were, it’s not like I’m a TV person.

Even though it may look like I am. Watching that video again now I’m struck by how funny I am, how my reactions are timed just right and I had just the right look at the right time.

Now, in my day job I’m trying to fix “fake news” and so I suppose I should be against this, but I am just not that funny. The editors spliced together little bits of reactions just perfectly so it makes me look like a comic genius. It was really great.

They had plenty to work with. I was in that chair for more than an hour, answering questions and going over some bits a couple of times. Still, I think they edited it to the perfect length.

Well… there was one edit that I might have made differently…

When Desi asked me if there were any other culprits that keep the clock broken, I said that the TV industry was actually involved. I pointed out that they don’t want it to be light out after work, they want it to be dark so that everyone will come inside and sit on the couch and watch TV.

Feigning an indignant huff, Desi said something like: Look, you can point out the evil of the retailers, and the Germans, and the golf people and the candy people, but do NOT question the wisdom or the morals of the television people!!!

That bit got cut. Hmmmmmm.

The idea of doing the interview in a clock shop seemed like a great idea, with only one problem: The clocks. Nearly all of them made some kind of sound, and none of them were on the right time, so in the middle of a line there’d be some GONG! right by Desi’s head and she’d grimace or mutter something. It was hilarious for a couple of times, and then she and all the crew seemed a little annoyed, but they kept rolling. I thought one of her reactions to a clock going off might make it into the final bit, but those also got cut. Maybe it was just funny to the people trying to keep the whole thing on schedule.

Once it was done, Desi was nice enough to take a picture with me, and then she and the crew went off to the desert to film the rest of the sketch.

She’s now back in New York, making people laugh, and I’m back to my desk in Denver, trying to figure out how to fix Daytime Save Light Time.

Daily Show Desi Lydic Daylight Saving Time