Neal J. Riley is a digital producer for CBS Boston. He has been with WBZ-TV since 2014. His work has appeared in The Boston Globe and The San Francisco Chronicle. Neal is a graduate of Boston University.
Daylight saving time began last weekend, with clocks springing forward to give Americans an extra hour of light in the evening. Now, a top lawmaker in Massachusetts says she wants it to stay that way.
State Senate President Karen Spilka on Friday said she supports a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent.
"This should be the last time that Massachusetts has to change our clocks," the Ashland Democrat said in a statement. "It would be better for our health, safer for our roads, and remove one more complication from everyone's lives."
Spilka said the bill was moved to the Rules Committee on Thursday, where it will be reviewed before a potential vote on the Senate floor.
The bill would make daylight saving time permanent by moving Massachusetts to a new time zone used by eastern Canada and parts of South America.
"The standard time within the commonwealth shall be the time known and designated by the federal statute as Atlantic standard time and shall be exempted from the change to daylight savings time," the bill says.
It would only take effect, however, if two or more states among New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York or Maine agree to do the same. Only Maine has enacted a similar bill, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Massachusetts would also need permission from the U.S. Department of Transportation to change time zones, the bill says.
Additionally, the bill calls for a task force to study how school day start times will be impacted by the change, since permanent daylight saving time would mean darker mornings in the winter.
The push to stop the clock-change has been happening for years. On the federal level, Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey has filed bills to move the whole country to permanent daylight saving time. The proposal passed the U.S. Senate unanimously in 2022, but the House of Representatives failed to take action.
The latest bill in Massachusetts is based on recommendations made by a special state commission in 2017. The commission's report found people would be more likely to shop and dine out after work if the sun sets later. It also said the change would be good for public health, as studies have linked changing the clocks to more heart attacks, strokes, sleep deprivation in teenagers and car crashes.
Some experts argue the better move is to end daylight saving time and restore standard time all year-round.
"Daylight Saving Time does not add any extra hours of sunlight to the day and it's especially bad in the winter when it robs morning sun," Dr. Karin Johnson, a sleep medicine specialist, told WBZ-TV in 2023.