On Wednesday, February 19 2014, "Arthur David Olson" wrote to "tz@iana.org" saying:
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 7:49 PM, Zoidsoft <zoidsoft@gmail.com> wrote:
Tennessee has proposed permanent daylight time: http://www.chattanoogan.com/2014/2/18/269932/ Legislation-Making-Daylight-Savings.aspx
If this moves forward at the state level, things could get interesting. The US Uniform Time Act lets states choose whether or not to make the DST switch, but may not allow for permanent DST (which would, in effect, be a time zone switch).
"Full text - Daylight Saving Time - United States Law - 15 USC 6(IX) (260-7)" http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/usc.html
A reminder: I am not a lawyer.
@dashdashado
In principle, Tennessee could simultaneously move to Atlantic time, and stop using Daylight Savings Time. I think the fact that they could choose to call their resulting UTC-4 time zone "EDT" rather than "AST" probably wouldn't be in violation of the Uniform Time Act (but I'm not a lawyer either). That said, the federal Department of Transportation (which apparently has jurisdiction over such things) hasn't allowed Maine to move to Atlantic Time, so the odds that they'd allow Tennessee to do so seem rather low. (If Maine does ever manage to move its time zone, naming its zone identifier is going to be an interesting challenge for the TZDB -- since "America/Portland" is rather unfortunately ambiguous...) -- Jonathan Lennox lennox@cs.columbia.edu