A proposed ballot initiative for the 2016 election would make daylight saving time the year-round standard in Colorado. (Photo by Joey Bunch/The Denver Post)
A proposed ballot initiative to make daylight saving time a year-round thing in Colorado takes a big step forward next week with a hearing to set the title that could appear on the 2016 ballot. First, a petition in the next six months to make it so.
Without the twice-a-year time shift there would be no more springing forward and falling back, no more driving home in pitch black darkness at 5 o’clock, which was 6 p.m. the week before; no more waking kids for school at the crack of dawn when 6 a.m. is renamed 7 a.m.
A Lakewood couple, Sean and Teri Johnson, is behind the proposed ballot initiative, and since about 60 have offered to help collect signatures, Sean Johnson said. The Johnsons have page, a and a .
“The time change has always affected me,” said Sean Johnson, a personal trainer who is president and CEO of J-Range Training in Littleton. “We have three kids, and dealing with them it’s even more difficult to handle. If affects my business and it affects my clients.”
The issue has come up and gone down before. In 2011 then-Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, now the , championed a failed attempt to allow Coloradans to stop changing the clocks each March and November. The Colorado Department of Revenue, however, cited increased programming costs to the state, and the ski , because they said it would be detrimental to their morning efforts to do avalanche control and other operations. Brophy , that time to put it to a vote of state residents.
Conversely, that same year, a bill by Rep. Ed Vigil, D-Fort Garland, would have taken Colorado off daylight saving time completely. It failed in a House committee, over fears or rising energy costs. “It’s a dark day for Colorado,”
At the hearing next Wednesday, the title board — made up of the Secretary of State’s Office, the Attorney General’s Office and the Office of Legislative Legal Services — will make sure the proposed ballot measure’s title is brief, clear and in the form of a yes-no question. It also can’t conflict with another title on the same ballot or tackle more than one subject.
Colorado has used daylight saving time since Congress passed the Uniform Time Act of 1966. States were allowed to opt out, but only Arizona, Hawaii and Indiana did, except for 16 counties in Indiana and the Navajo reservation in Arizona. Indiana began using daylight saving time after a in 2006. The Arizona daylight saving time last month.
Some of the things outlined as benefits in the Colorado proposal were cited in the Indiana debate: fewer car accidents, energy savings and the impact on business that keep the extra hour of sunlight year round. The Johnsons say it’s also better for the environment, assists road crews and helps people with seasonal affective disorder and special-needs children who struggle with the time shift.
The , and anyone interested can listen in to the title hearing on Feb. 18 by via the department’s website, as well.
The next time change, by the way, is March 8, so ready yourself to get up an hour earlier.
