The Juneau Chamber of Commerce is seeking input from community chambers around Southeast Alaska regarding the elimination of Daylight Savings Time.
A bill which would take the state off of DST remains in subcommittee in the Alaska State House, after being passed by the Senate in March. Its consideration by the House State Affairs Committee will resume when the Legislature starts its next session in January.
Under the DST-less system being proposed, Alaska would continue to remain four hours behind the East Standard Time Zone during the winter. But from March to November, Alaskans would be five hours behind when other states moved their clocks forward.
To address this, Senate Bill 6 also includes a provision allowing the state to petition the United States Department of Transportation for a time zone change, which would put the state into Pacific Standard Time. During the winter Alaska would then be only three hours behind the East Coast, and four behind during the rest of the country’s switch to DST.
The JCC intends to provide testimony during the upcoming legislative session, and so would like to gather input from individual communities to present data representative of public opinion. The Alaska State Chamber of Commerce has opposed the bill, citing potential inconveniences to businesses and residents if Alaska opts out of DST alone. In the United States only Hawaii, most of Arizona, and a handful of territories and municipalities currently do not participate in DST.
Among reasons for not eliminating DST as proposed in SB6, JCC argues the loss of an hour of daylight would be detrimental to flight operations, boat charters and related tourism activities. This would be most acutely felt during the “shoulder months” of March-April and August-September, it reasons.
Creating a two-hour differential from the Pacific Northwest during the spring, summer and fall – not to mention a five-hour differential with the East Coast – would take away an additional hour of opportunity for business.
“Having a time zone that doesn’t shift with our adjacent markets will create its own level of confusion and require that certain business activities be conducted even earlier in the day than currently occurs,” a JCC media release writes.
Being several solar hours over, residents of Western Alaska would be most affected by the change. The sun already appears in the Aleutians and western coast later in the morning than for communities in the east, and the loss of a further hour by shifting time zones would only make that worse.
Wrangell residents and Chamber of Commerce members are encouraged to fill out the survey, found at http://survey.constantcontact.com/survey/a07ebw6jq9zihe26dxj/start.
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