The House is expected to vote on a bill seeking statewide observance of daylight-saving time, even though the federal government has declared some of its provisions illegal.
House Republicans pushing the legislation could have pursued procedural moves to remove those provisions before a House vote.
But time constraints and political complications have caused lawmakers to seek House passage of a defective bill and bank on a House-Senate conference committee to fix it so it stands a chance of advancing in the Senate.
"We obviously would rather have a perfect piece of legislation that goes over to the Senate, but that is not the option available to us at this point in time, so our only choice is to move the flawed legislation and try to work it out in conference committee," House Speaker Brian Bosma said Wednesday.
what's the rush? indiana has lived with the current system since the '70s. do they think the world will end if we don't pass a dst law this year (even though dst is already in effect, and we'd have to fuck up the system even more in order to observe it this year)?
The leader of the Senate said his chamber could not accept the bill in its current form, and it would need to be fixed in a conference committee to stay alive.
"You should not knowingly violate federal law or regulations," said Senate President Pro Tem Garton, R-Columbus, adding that the problem makes a faster route for advancing the bill out of the question.
The provisions deemed illegal would allow counties bordering the Central time zone to opt out of daylight saving time. Those affected counties border Illinois and 10 northwestern and southwestern Indiana counties now lying in the Central time zone. If some of those counties opted out, then their neighboring counties could also.
However, the U.S. Department of Transportation, which regulates time zones, has said those provisions would be illegal. It cites a federal law that says any state with more than one time zone can only exempt either the entire state from daylight time or all of its area within any single time zone.
note that this also means that the current arrangement, where several southern indiana counties are in eastern but do observe dst, is also illegal, although the govt has never enforced that,
and as this LTE points out, arizona is doing just fine creating new jobs without dst... so why is it so important for indiana to switch?
