Senate stopped bill to get rid of daylight saving time, even as most Utahns support the legislation

Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The Utah Senate halted a bill to eliminate daylight saving time.
A poll showed 81% of Utah voters support staying on standard time year-round.
The bill passed the House but was stopped in a Senate committee.

SALT LAKE CITY — The switch to daylight saving time is coming this weekend, and a bill to keep Utah on standard time all year long was stopped Tuesday by the Senate.

The latest Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll shows Utahns support the bill to keep the state from changing its clocked twice a year. The poll was conducted by HarrisX before the bill was stopped.

HB120, sponsored by Joseph Elison, R-Toquerville, passed through the House but then was halted in its Senate committee hearing.

The bill's sponsor said that the bill was the most tracked bill of the session, and most Utahns want an end to having to change their clocks twice a year.

What do Utahns think of daylight saving time legislation?

The poll informed those answering about the bill and the changes lawmakers wanted to make and asked if they would support the action to get rid of daylight saving time.

Senate stopped bill to get rid of daylight saving time, even as most Utahns support the legislation

The poll was conducted among 805 registered Utah voters from Feb. 18-25. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. The bill's progress was stopped on Feb. 19.

Eighty-one percent of registered voters said that they support the action from the Legislature, with 53% strongly supporting it and 29% somewhat supporting it.

The numbers were similar among both Republicans and Democrats, with 54% of Republicans in support of the legislation and 50% of Democrats.

The state of daylight saving legislation

Currently, the Uniform Time Act of 1966 gives states the option to stop observing daylight saving time and stick to standard time year-round. But, the law does not allow states to observe only daylight saving time year round, as previously reported by the Deseret News.

In 2020, Utah passed a law to put the state on Mountain Daylight Time year round, when the federal government allows it or if multiple neighboring states also adopt the policy.

Adopting permanent standard time through HB120 would have been the only way to immediately eliminate changing clocks, per KSL.com.

Daylight saving time starts on March 9, and the switch back to standard time will be on Nov. 2.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.