In the early morning hours this Sunday, March 9, Coloradans will lose an hour of sleep, as clocks jump ahead.
This continues to happen despite Colorado lawmakers passing a bill in 2022 to make daylight saving time permanent.
“I just don't like the fact that the clocks keep changing,” said state Sen. Cathy Kipp, who sponsored the bill, in a recent interview with CPR News. “When we lose that hour of sleep, what happens is we all suffer a little bit from sleep deprivation.”
But in order for the bill to take effect, Colorado stipulated it must also receive approval from Congress, and that four neighboring states in the Mountain Time Zone would also have to make the change.
“If every state was in its own time zone it would start to get pretty confusing,” Kipp said.
Kipp was hopeful later that year when the U.S. Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act to lock the entire country into daylight saving time, but that effort stalled.
“Everybody started lobbying their House members, saying ‘You can't do this,’ for whatever reason,” Kipp said.
Without Congressional approval and neighboring states on board, Colorado’s permanent daylight saving effort stalled, too, though this isn’t the first time this has come up. The U.S. tried year-round daylight saving time in the 1970s, to save money on energy when conflict in the Middle East made the price of oil quadruple.
Nearly 80% of Americans supported it at the time, but after the first winter, that number dropped into the low 40s, as people started getting concerned about their kids walking to school in the dark. That led Congress to reverse course and scrap the experiment.
Kipp believes that if permanent daylight time were to return, it would need better planning to avoid the mistakes of the past.
“If you did it in a more controlled fashion, and people knew what was coming, they would have the opportunity to adjust school bus schedules or school start time schedules,” she said.
