By BRIAN BLAI
If the changing of your clock has had you in a slump lately, and more than finals has got you drowsy, a state lawmaker is trying to help.
Rep. Doyle Mortimer, R-Orem, wants to do away with the daylight- saving time change in Utah. He has proposed that the 1996 Utah Legislature change the policy of setting clocks forward each spring. When lawmakers adjourned at the end of February, his bill had not gone anywhere.
'Federal law allows the states to either accept it (daylight-saving time) or go back to standard time and (there is) no other option, so the bill was simply for us to return to operating on mountain standard time all year round,' Mortimer said.
Hawaii, Alaska and Arizona are among the states that do not set their clocks ahead.
'Originally it (the bill) was brought forward by a constituent who felt that daylight-saving time really didn't offer anything. Then when I proposed the bill, I received a lot of research that had been done both in the medical community and in others that actually showed that sometimes it can be harmful to a body to do that,' Mortimer said.
Mortimer said that because of the geographical location of Utah, residents of the state really don't gain anymore daylight hours.
'You have times when you first switch to daylight-saving time that you have more dark in the morning than when you switch back to standard, and there is no question you do gain evening hours, you just don't gain total daylight hours, and so there is no real advantage in total daylight hours,' Mortimer said.
Mortimer also believes that having fewer daylight hours affects people's health.
'The other thing is a lot of our schools in Utah start very early, especially the high schools, and the medical findings show we have a sensor in our brain that is sensitive to daylight,' he said. 'We stay up at night because we are already up but then our body doesn't want to arise until (daylight) and the longer before it's light that we are up, the more actually sleep deprived we become.'