[tz] Tennessee time (was Web sites using recent versions of the tz database)

[lennox at cs.columbia.edu]

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