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Daylight saving time is ending this weekend. These states want to make DST permanent
Adjust your clocks back one hour Nov. 3 at 2 a.m. — lest you wake up an hour early to everything in the days ahead. But some states might change that.
Here we go again: Time to fall back after we sprang forward.
The end of daylight saving time is fast approaching, and with it comes an "extra" hour of sleep and the slow disappearance of early-evening sunlight.
Unless you reside in the states of Arizona (except the Navajo Nation) or Hawaii or the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, adjust your clocks back one hour Nov. 3 at 2 a.m. – lest you wake up an hour early to everything in the days ahead.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Uniform Time Act in 1966, which established daylight saving time from the second Sunday of March through the first Sunday of October.
The law also allows states to remain in standard time all year and does not require states to adhere to daylight saving time. However, it does require that states get approval from Congress before making daylight saving time permanent.
In fact, those against changing clocks during the year include President Donald Trump, who tweeted in March that making DST "permanent is O.K. with me." Other advocates argue that shifting time twice a year can cause an increased risk of stroke and heart attack, as well as affecting adults 65 or older more drastically.
Those in favor of shifting time include the National Parent Teacher Association, which says that children would have to commute to school in the dark with year-round daylight saving time, and the U.S. Department of Transportation, which says that the time changes save energy and cut crime.
Seven states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington – have approved legislation to make daylight saving time permanent. These states still need the OK from the federal government to enact the change, however.
A handful of other states, including Alaska, California,Iowa, Massachusetts, Texas, Utah and Vermont have introduced legislation to make changes to how they observe daylight saving time.
Some of those states in New England, rather than introduce permanent daylight saving time, are proposing a workaround by making a year-round Atlantic Standard Time (AST) — a new additional time zone one hour ahead of Eastern Standard Time. In doing so, these states would effectively be observing daylight saving time permanently without having to put it to a vote in Congress.
Other states, such as Texas, are considering moving to permanent standard time altogether rather than daylight saving time.
To make matters more complicated, some states considering switching to a form of permanent daylight saving time, including Delaware and Oregon, require that the other states in their time zone switch with them, meaning that their proposals may be indefinitely postponed.
