Alaska would be on the same time zone as Seattle for four months of the year, if a bill passed Monday by the Alaska Senate becomes law.
The Senate voted 18-2 to pass Senate Bill 26, which would eliminate daylight saving time in Alaska and ask the federal government to put Alaska on Pacific Standard Time.
“Senate Bill 26 is a compromise that addresses long-standing frustrations with Alaska’s timekeeping system,” said Sen. Kelly Merrick, R-Eagle River and the bill’s sponsor. “This bill would permanently exempt Alaska from daylight saving time, keeping us on standard time year-round.”
If fully implemented, the bill would leave Alaska in the same time zone as Seattle from November through early March.
The rest of the year, it would be one hour behind that city, as Washington state observes daylight saving time. If Congress passes a bill allowing permanent daylight saving time, Alaska would return to being one hour behind Seattle permanently.
Merrick said her bill is supported by the state’s tourism trade association, as well as financial institutions, “because it keeps us within three or four hours of the stock market and financial center in New York.”
Daylight saving time has been a regular topic of conversation in the Alaska Legislature.
The Alaska Senate voted to request the elimination of daylight saving time in 2015, but the House failed to pass the bill.
No DST bill was introduced in 2017 or 2018, but since then, a daylight saving time bill has been introduced in either the House or Senate every year since 2019.
The bill goes in a different direction from Alaska’s neighbor, Yukon, which moved to permanent daylight time in 2020, leaving the territory geographically adjacent but two hours away, chronologically, from November through early March.
For a century, Alaska stretched over four time zones. That changed in 1983, when the state’s time zones were consolidated to two, with Yakutat being the only community that kept its previous time zone. The result means that in most parts of Alaska, the clock has little to do with the position of the sun in the sky.
Sen. Scott Kawasaki, D-Fairbanks, proposed a competing bill that would move Alaska to permanent Alaska Standard Time, but that idea stalled out in committee.
“I do believe that permanent standard time makes more sense for daylight. It’s more in sync for where we’re at. However, because we’re at such a high latitude, it matters a lot less,” he said, explaining that the amount of daylight changes rapidly throughout the year.
Kawasaki ended up voting for the bill.
“My main issue with time is that you have to reset your clocks twice, and that’s a big pain in the ass,” he said.
Sens. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, and Robert Myers, R-North Pole, shared his concerns about solar time but voted against the bill.
“I’ve opposed changing it numerous times over the years,” Stedman said.
“It just doesn’t work relative to sun time,” he said.
Myers said the bill has the potential to aggravate that problem.
“I am not a fan of the time zone change portion of that bill,” he said. “Most of Alaska … is already an hour off of where we should be solar time, and there are some studies out there dealing with both health and energy use that say we should stay close to solar time.”
“I really would love to see the federal government repeal daylight saving time across the board,” he said.
In April, President Donald Trump said he was open to the idea and urged Congress to pass a bill making daylight saving time permanent, thus eliminating the annual clock change.
That makes this the right time to pass SB 26, Merrick said.
“Having the federal administration on board greatly increases our chances of successfully eliminating daylight saving time,” she said. “I know sometimes change is hard, but SB 26 will keep us from having to change our clocks, at least.”
• James Brooks is a longtime Alaska reporter, having previously worked at the Anchorage Daily News, Juneau Empire, Kodiak Mirror and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. This article originally appeared online at alaskabeacon.com. Alaska Beacon, an affiliate of States Newsroom, is an independent, nonpartisan news organization focused on connecting Alaskans to their state government.
