As the Bismarck Tribune reported back in 2017, it was political gerrymandering mostly lobbied for by the railroads which was the genesis for our oddball time zones today.īut would there be political support for restoring the old time zone? It seems unlikely that we’d put Valley City and Fargo on different time zones. The boundary between the Central and Mountain time zones was originally the 97.5 parallel, which runs north and south through the state about 40 miles west of Fargo. What’s more, if anything, most of North Dakota should be in the Mountain Time Zone. “Both Billings and Stark county voters in 2010 shot down a proposal to switch to Central time that was introduced by a Dickinson city commissioner,” my colleague Austin Howard reports. In fact, in the not so distant past, they’ve specifically rejected the idea. If the folks there wanted a change, you’d think they’d be the ones calling for it. The zone to be imposed on the 11 counties in the southwest part of the state which are currently in the Mountain Time Zone. Kasper’s bill will see about as much success as SB2167 did last session, and there are a lot of reasons for it.įor one thing, all of the sponsors of this legislation live in the Central Time Zone. Jim Kasper has introduced HB1486 which, if passed, would put the entire state in the central time zone:

In the 2019 session we have a new bill, this time originating in the state House. It failed in the state Senate on a 11-33 vote with no debate. SB2167 that session would have ended daylight savings time in our state, and moved the entire state into the central time zone. SAB readers will remember that North Dakota’s 2017 legislative session included a debate over time zones.

Time zones south dakota