Sedgwick County commissioners are tired of springing forward and falling back.
So much so that they’ve included ending the annual switch to daylight saving time as part of their legislative agenda, a list they compile every year of actions they’d like the state Legislature to take.
It’s not their highest priority, coming in behind mental health, taxation, criminal justice and voting issues. “There are already a couple of states that don’t change (clocks) back and forth,” said Commission Chairman David Dennis. “This also came up in my Citizens’ Advisory Board and they were 100 percent in favor of this. I think probably the dominant thought is we just go to daylight savings time and just stay there.”
“The other thing I’ve heard, and I did a little bit of research on the internet, is it looks like the days more people have heart attacks is the day that we spring forward and they lose an hour of sleep, so that’s something else to consider for the health of our community,” Dennis said.
According to popular mythology, daylight saving time was started to give farmers an extra hour of field work in the evening during the warmer months.
That’s not actually true. Germany started it in World War I as an energy-saving measure and the United States followed suit near the end of the war.
Daylight saving time resurfaced as a World War II conservation measure, but didn’t become a full-time national policy until the 1966 passage of the Uniform Time Act that established when clocks should be turned forward and turned back.
(Read more: Wichita Eagle)