Elise Amendola / AP
In this Thursday, Nov. 3, 2016, photo, Dan LaMoore sizes hands for an 8-foot diameter silhouette clock at Electric Time Co. in Medfield, Mass.
Friday, March 12, 2021 | 2 a.m.
CARSON CITY — The start of daylight saving time at 2 a.m. Sunday will mean one less hour of sleep for people as clocks are set ahead.
Daylight saving time provides an extra hour of light in the evenings but also forces people to reconcile their physical and biological clocks each March.
The burden of that adjustment is at the heart of a measure being considered by the Nevada Legislature to permanently set Nevada to a single time, either standard or daylight. But Senate Bill 153 won’t got into effect unless California also makes the switch, and until Congress allows it.
California voters in 2018 approved a proposition allowing the Legislature to adopt daylight saving time year-round. It would require two-thirds approval by the state Senate and Assembly.
Congress then would also have to sign off on the change.
Talks died in the California Senate in May, however, over how to implement the change. Lawmakers also worried about California’s time not aligning with that just over the border in Mexico, which observes standard time.
It’s unknown if the issue will be discussed again in the ongoing California legislative session. But there’s an appetite nationally to make the switch, with eight states approving laws for year-round daylight saving time in the past two years, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Oregon agreed in June to move to permanent daylight saving time, but only if Washington and California followed suit. Washington enacted a similar measure.
The Utah Legislature in 2020 passed a bill saying it would change to daylight saving time permanently if four Western states did so. If Nevada and California change, enough states would have made the switch to trigger the bill’s provisions. Utah observes Mountain Standard Time, an hour ahead of Nevada.
In Nevada, Assembly Minority Leader Robin Titus, R-Wellington, supports the bill because data shows shifting sleep schedules caused by time changes can hurt people’s health.
“I think we need to stop worrying about switching and just hold on to a time,” Titus said.
This isn’t the first time the Nevada Legislature has tackled the issue. In the 2015 session, lawmakers passed a resolution urging Congress to allow states to use daylight saving time permanently. State Sen. Joe Hardy, R-Boulder City, echoed Titus’ concerns, saying that disrupting the body’s internal clock can wreak havoc on people’s health.
“You’re starting to play with the physiology of human beings when you do this,” he said.
Hardy said his preference between daylight and standard time is “whichever time California picks.”
“When they change, I want to be in a position to change,” he said. “That’s why the bill is written to whatever California does, that’s what we’re going to do.”
Sen. Pete Goicoechea, R-Eureka, said a change could hurt some ranchers and farmers in rural Nevada because “the cows don’t know that next Sunday the time’s changed, or this fall. It throws everything off.”
But he still supports the measure because of Reno’s proximity to Sacramento and Las Vegas’ proximity to Los Angeles.
“I’m hoping that we’ll go with California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Idaho … all on the same time zone,” he said. “That’d be great.”
Daylight saving time was set into a regular system by the federal government through the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Standard time is the term for when the clocks fall back to what they would be without daylight saving time, bringing sunnier mornings and earlier nightfall. It last occurred Nov. 1 in Nevada.
Hawaii and Arizona both stay on standard time year round.
