I live in Denver, and recently had my first overnight trip in more than a year, going to Nebraska and Kansas to testify and talk to legislators (and to… you know… get out of the house and have a bit of father-son road-trip bonding time.)
And now I’m feeling really bad that I didn’t make the trip just a bit longer.
I knew that North Dakota had a vote Friday, and I thought about driving north from Lincoln, making a quick stop in Pierre, and then heading to Bismarck to talk to legislators about their Daylight Saving Time bill.
The mistake I made was looking at the forecast, which showed that the expected high was going to be 9 degrees above zero. If you have to designate that a temperature is above or below zero… that’s cold. And that was the high, and didn’t count the wind chill, and from previous trips I know how the wind blows up there.
If I had as much fur as this North Dakota bunny, the bill might have passed!
Photo by Atharva Tulsi on Unsplash
Well, I didn’t go, and the bill lost by ONE VOTE. Put into temperature terms, it was “one below.”
The issue was that some legislators were concerned that if they lock the clock, it might be confusing for people who have business over state lines, or live and work on two sides of the state line.
If I had only met the sponsor before he wrote up his bill, I might have guided him in how to get a DST bill passed.
And if I hadn’t have been such a wimp about the weather, I probably could have convinced just one legislator that the bill won’t take effect until there’s a change in federal law, at which point all the neighboring states will also stop DST clock changing, so passing this bill will just be a signal to the feds that N.D. wants to #LockTheClock.
And maybe one of the legislators—we only needed one!—would have switched if they heard about the experience in Arizona where a lawmaker proposed that they start DST switching to make it less confusing, and was so flooded with constituents telling him that they liked it the way it was that he held a press conference announcing that he was killing his own bill.
I gotta not worry about it. The bills this year are absolutely on fire, and are winning at a higher percentage than they ever have before; indeed the Flickertail State is the only one with a loss so far this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get to 30 states this year who have passed something to #LockTheClock.
But like the Prodigal Son, the loss of even one state (by one vote!) is rough when I could have helped.
Update: It turns out I didn’t kill it!