In Boston, the sun sometimes sets as early as 4:10 p.m. in the winter. Massachusetts lawmakers are considering shifting the time zone from Eastern Standard Time to Atlantic Standard Time and eliminating Daylight Saving Time in order to make chilly winter nights a little shorter, according to Time and Date’s website. If this change moves forward, Massachusetts will be one hour ahead of the other states on the Eastern Seaboard.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker signed a bill in August that establishes a panel that will study the effects of permanently setting the clocks forward one hour. The researchers will study how the shift would impact the economy, education, public health, transportation and energy consumption in the state and are set to come to a conclusion in July of next year, according to Time and Date.
“Campus just seems less lively when it’s dark outside for such a long time [in the winter],” said Renzo Callejas, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. “I think people tend to be happier when the sun is shining and the weather is nice.”
The potential change is partially meant to encourage recent college graduates to stay in Massachusetts following graduation instead of leaving for warmer places. This was one of Tom Emswiler’s main arguments when he wrote a op-ed in The Boston Globe in 2014 arguing for an abolishment of DST and shifting Massachusetts to Atlantic Standard Time. After Emswiler’s article earned praise from readers, legislators began considering changing the state’s time zone.
“Shifting one time zone would give us a 5:11 sunset — a small but meaningful competitive change,” Emsweiler wrote in the op-ed.
The impact of the change in time zone extends beyond college students and recent graduates to local industries. John Lee, the general manager at Allandale Farm in Chestnut Hill, said farms in Massachusetts often work with farms in New Hampshire and Rhode Island for deliveries and the transportation of goods, and if New England states run on different time zones than Massachusetts it might change the way farms operate.
“It’s not going to change the amount of daylight, so it won’t affect crop production,” Lee said, “but it is going to be a nuisance to schedule a delivery from New Hampshire or Rhode Island if we’re running on different times.”
Gary Keough, the director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service’s New England Field Office, said he does not think the time zone change would have an effect on anything except the movement of products across state lines.
“I don’t see it being an advantage at all,” Keough said, “especially if Massachusetts is the only state that does it.”
The day-to-day activities of local farms will remain the same, Keough said.
“If shoppers are used to going to a farmer’s market at 10 a.m., then they’ll probably still go at roughly the same time,” he said. “The cows are going to be milked no matter what time the sun sets. The change will only be on paper, as far I can tell.”
Keough mentioned that the debate around eliminating daylight savings has been prevalent in Massachusetts fpr the last few years, but the suggestion of changing entire time zones is new.
“I’ve been in the New England area for 10 years, and this is the first time I’ve heard of the concept of changing time zones,” he said.
Joseph Harris, a sociology professor at Boston University, wrote in an email to The Daily Free Press that eliminating DST involves more than finding enough evidence to rationalize the change, because it could also impact the state’s economy and politics.
“While a couple states have made the decision to abandon daylight savings time, the vast majority still use it,” Harris wrote. “This is because when policies are passed, entrenched economic and political interests grow around them, making legislative change really difficult — sometimes even when evidence suggests that change may be beneficial.”
If Massachusetts decides to go through with the change, the government will have to consider the various implications this change would have on industry, politics and the population, Harris wrote.
“Although the agricultural lobby in New England may be less powerful than in some of America’s breadbasket states, making the possibility of policy change here seem more possible, I have not heard much from a coalition for changing the policy,” Harris wrote. “How that coalition frames the policy to legislators and the general public could play an important role in putting the issue on the political agenda.”
