[tz] Tennessee time

Matt Johnson mj1856 at hotmail.com
Sun Mar 2 05:45:10 UTC 2014


The video from the Tennessee state house of representatives where this bill
was pitched can be found here (about 10 min long):
http://tnga.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=269&clip_id=8600&meta_id=15
8484

"... you came up with a Wang Dangger!" - Rep. Johnny Shaw

I believe Rep. Todd is mistaken in his assertion that staying on DST
year-round would give more daylight to schoolchildren waiting at the bus
stop in the morning.  Wouldn't it actually work in reverse?

-----Original Message-----
From: tz-bounces at iana.org [mailto:tz-bounces at iana.org] On Behalf Of
lennox at cs.columbia.edu
Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2014 8:07 AM
To: Arthur David Olson
Cc: tz at iana.org
Subject: Re: [tz] Tennessee time (was Web sites using recent versions of the
tz database)

On Wednesday, February 19 2014, "Arthur David Olson" wrote to "tz at iana.org"
saying:

> On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 7:49 PM, Zoidsoft <zoidsoft at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>     Tennessee has proposed permanent daylight time:
>      
>     http://www.chattanoogan.com/2014/2/18/269932/
>     Legislation-Making-Daylight-Savings.aspx
> 
> 
> If this moves forward at the state level, things could get interesting.
> The US Uniform Time Act lets states choose whether or not to make the 
> DST switch, but may not allow for permanent DST (which would, in 
> effect, be a time zone switch).
> 
>     "Full text - Daylight Saving Time - United States Law - 15 USC 
> 6(IX) (260-7)"
>     http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/usc.html
> 
> A reminder: I am not a lawyer.
> 
>     @dashdashado

In principle, Tennessee could simultaneously move to Atlantic time, and stop
using Daylight Savings Time.  I think the fact that they could choose to
call their resulting UTC-4 time zone "EDT" rather than "AST" probably
wouldn't be in violation of the Uniform Time Act (but I'm not a lawyer
either).

That said, the federal Department of Transportation (which apparently has
jurisdiction over such things) hasn't allowed Maine to move to Atlantic
Time, so the odds that they'd allow Tennessee to do so seem rather low.

(If Maine does ever manage to move its time zone, naming its zone identifier
is going to be an interesting challenge for the TZDB -- since
"America/Portland" is rather unfortunately ambiguous...)

--
Jonathan Lennox
lennox at cs.columbia.edu


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