FORNEY, Texas — Tonight, Texans will spring their clocks one hour for daylight savings. Legislators in both the Texas House and Senate want you to know it doesn't have to be this way.
FORNEY, Texas — Tonight, Texans will spring their clocks one hour for daylight savings. Legislators in both the Texas House and Senate want you to know it doesn't have to be this way.
"All the reasons that we used to have daylight saving [time] are a thing of the past," says Senator Jose Menendez of San Antonio. "We just need to pick a time that we like — if we like the spring forward, keep it — and that's it. We don't move back and forth."
Menendez filed a bill earlier this year that would keep Texas on one clock permanently, beginning Nov. 4, 2019, the day after clocks are set to return to standard time this year. If more of his colleagues want to stay on daylight saving time than standard time, however, Menendez is perfectly willing to change his bill. More daylight hours are fine, he said. The unique point of Menendez’s bill is that he wants the voters to decide what they want.
Getting rid of the time changes has bipartisan support in both chambers of the Legislature. Menendez's bill is co-authored by Republicans Bob Hall and Bryan Hughes. In the House, Republican Lyle Larson has filed a bill similar to Menendez's.
“Doing something just because it has always been done is no reason to continue it,” Larson said in a press release. “Let’s mark the 100th anniversary of this antiquated policy by finally putting an end to it.”
If Texas opts out of changing its clocks twice a year, it would join Hawaii and Arizona as the only states to do so.
In 2015, House Bill 150 would have abolished daylight saving time, and it was amended to also set Eastern Standard Time as “Texas time.” That would mean all Texans would have to make adjustments, rather than the state picking one of the time zones already in its boundaries. The bill came closer to becoming a law than any other daylight saving time proposal in recent years; it cleared a committee and reached the House floor but did not pass. Similar bills have been proposed — unsuccessfully — for at least two decades.
