Florida lawmakers made daylight saving time permanent. So why do the clocks change?
Despite lawmakers choosing to “lock the clock” in 2018 and despite Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Longboat Key, introducing legislation last year, Floridians are only seeing their clocks temporarily spring forward one hour this weekend as daylight saving time begins.
It officially happens at 2 a.m. Sunday, though automated devices such as cellphones, tablets, computers and more update to the new time without you needing to do anything.
The prevailing idea is to set your clock ahead one hour when going to bed Saturday night for non-automated updated time devices.
But why is it a temporary change for Floridians?
Let’s go back to 2018.
That year Florida’s Legislature passed the “Sunshine Protection Act,” which would keep Florida on daylight saving time, the act of moving your clocks ahead by one hour, permanently.
But to have it go into effect, the U.S. Congress has to approve it, because of the Uniform Time Act of 1966. And that did not happen.
In 2021, Buchanan — whose congressional district represents Manatee County and parts of Sarasota and Hillsborough counties — introduced House Resolution 69, also called the Sunshine Protection Act of 2021.
The bill said, “this bill makes daylight savings time the new, permanent standard time. States with areas exempt from daylight savings time may choose the standard time for those areas.”
Florida’s two senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, advocated for the Sunshine Protection Act of 2021 through S.623, a bill Rubio introduced with Scott as one of 14 co-sponsors, which included bipartisan support, last March.
However, neither bill has passed through Congress or the Senate, leaving Floridians like 48 other states with the need to push the clocks back in November and keeping this weekend’s time change temporary. Hawaii and most of Arizona are on standard time year-round.
Origins and opposition to daylight saving time
One of America’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, is often credited with the daylight saving time idea. Franklin wrote a 1784 essay about it as a way to conserve the need for lamp oil, while New Zealand entomologist George Hudson came up with the modern-day concept in 1895, so he had more daylight to look for bugs.
But the idea did not gain traction among U.S. lawmakers until World War I and then in World War II as a wartime measure. The Uniform Time Act in 1966 made the change in time an annual passage throughout the country.
And while proponents want to stop changing the clocks twice a year, opponents — mainly parents and teachers — argue that a permanent daylight saving time means darker mornings and increased safety risks for children heading to school, whether it’s new teen drivers on the road or students walking to a bus stop or nearby school.
This story was originally published November 5, 2021 at 4:36 PM with the headline "Florida lawmakers made daylight saving time permanent. So why do the clocks change?."
