He said he wished it had not eclipsed attention from everything else that has happened in Indiana this year, but added, "It was still a right thing to do." "I was a first-time candidate and I committed the sin of straight answers." What he meant back then, he said, was that he could "see an argument" for Central time.Īsked whether he regretted raising the issue of time altogether, Mr. In a telephone interview this week, the governor said he would make his own recommendations once he heard from local communities, and he disputed claims that he had openly favored Central time during his campaign for governor. Others say he should now pick one side or another (Eastern time versus Central time) and not leave such a major question up to local counties. Some say he should never have fussed with the state's clocks at all. Governor Daniels, meanwhile, has taken pointed criticism. "We are the keepers of time zones and we do our work on this subject according to the law and the rule making process." "We don't have a dog in this hunt," said Robert Johnson, a department spokesman. "How confusing will that be? Whatever else happens now, I care about us all in this area being on the same time. "We have about 1,500 people who drive to work in Dubois County every day," said Gayle Strassell, the mayor of Tell City, Perry's county seat. In the south, Dubois County was preliminarily turned down in its wish to switch to Central time, while its neighbor to the east and south, Perry County, received initial approval. Joseph County - the home of South Bend in the northern section of the state - would wind up in a different time zone than Elkhart County, just next door. Those recommendations, which will be the topic of what are certain to be lengthy and contentious hearings in the coming days, set off a whole new ripple of confusion. (Two other counties dropped out of the whole matter.) This month, the federal Department of Transportation - the arbiter of time zone fights - recommended that 5 of those counties be allowed to switch, and 12 others stay put. "The missed conference calls, the missed plane flights, the missed delivery schedules."īut as part of the daylight saving legislation, lawmakers also agreed to take another look at the state's time zones, a move that set off a flurry of applications by leaders in 19 counties who said they now wanted to switch to Central time from Eastern time. "Up until now, it's been death by 1,000 paper cuts," said Kevin Brinegar, president of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. By not falling back and springing forward with the most of the country, supporters said, Indiana had lost hours and hours of business with companies in New York and Chicago and all the other places that could not keep track of this state's daylight saving time quirk. There, at the governor's urging and with the strong backing of the state's business community, legislators narrowly agreed to adopt daylight saving time for the whole state. "Nothing will ever be more confusing than the world we're leaving behind," Governor Daniels said this week, defending his choice to take up the thorny time question in the Legislature this year. But like only a few other states, most of Indiana has not, until now, recognized daylight saving time, a refusal that dates back some three decades to the complaints of farmers and drive-in movie theater owners, who did not want it to be dark so late in the morning or stay light so late at night. Most of Indiana's 92 counties are on Eastern time, while 10 counties in the northwest, near Chicago, and southwest, around Evansville, are on Central time. I want to be able to go somewhere at 8 o'clock and have it be 8 o'clock where I'm going. Richards said, "I don't care what time we're on - I just wish the whole state could be on the same time and be done with it. "When you're making plans around here, all you can do is say, 'My time or your time?' And then you still get confused." "You never know what time it is around here, and it looks to me now as though we may never know," Bettye Richards said as she and three friends played bridge at the community center in this southern Indiana town. Mitch Daniels, the Republican in his first year in office, for not knowing better than to tackle such a long-standing, politically dicey question in the first place. With public hearings into the difficulties set to begin around the state on Sunday, some residents said they had given up even on understanding the latest permutation of counties that might move into a new time zone and those that might not.
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