SACRAMENTO — Andrea Feathers has a message for the California Legislature: Don’t mess with our daylight saving time.

This weekend’s annual ritual of springing ahead an hour is under siege again in Sacramento. So Feathers — a Los Angeles resident who started a Facebook group called “Save the Light” to fight proposals to rid the state of the twice-yearly time change — finds herself taking up her cause yet again.

“A few weeks of unpleasantness is much better than eight months of early darkness,” she said.

Despite losing an hour this week, legislators will soon find the time to consider Assembly Bill 807 — San Jose Democrat Kansen Chu’s measure calling for a statewide ballot measure aimed at repealing the state’s Daylight Saving Time Act.

Related Articles Daylight Saving begins

Will California end Daylight Saving Time?

The year Daylight Saving Time went too far In a state obsessed with outdoor recreation, the prospect of an earlier sunset is enough to get Californians in a lather about something other than Donald Trump. Opponents raise concerns ranging from public safety to youth sports to mental health.

“Let’s just not ignore the fact that people are happy when it’s light out longer,” said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola law professor who acknowledges having an outsize passion for long summer days. “It just seems like a terrible idea to reduce the number of daylight hours we can enjoy. Why would the dead hand of the government come in and tell us there should be more darkness?”

The Assembly passed a similar resolution by Chu last year, but it died in the Senate. Now the assemblyman, perhaps hearing his critics, included language to possibly adopt daylight saving time year-round, if Uncle Sam would allow it.

In an interview Friday, Chu said he enjoys the long summer days too.

There’s only one problem with that idea: the U.S. Uniform Time Act of 1966, which was passed to coordinate a confusing patchwork of time zones that complicated everything from train to TV schedules. While moving clocks forward in the spring is optional — Arizona and Hawaii don’t do it — federal law now requires states to be on standard time between the first Sunday in November and the second Sunday in March.

In a separate proposal from Chu, the Legislature would ask Congress to amend the Uniform Time Act to give states the option to adopt year-round daylight saving time.

Chu said he got the idea for changing the 70-year tradition from a family with young children who battled to get their kids to sleep an hour earlier each night. To him, the ritual defies common sense.

“There are a lot of people asking me, ‘Why do you want to do it?'” Chu said. “I’m always trying to understand, why not? Why don’t we revisit this practice and see if there’s any benefit?”

If Chu’s ballot measure goes to the voters and wins, state lawmakers would have the authority to adopt standard time with a simple majority vote. Or as Chu put it, somewhat ironically, to “switch it back and forth” to find what works the best.

While dwarfed by concerns about the future of the nation’s health care system and the state’s fragile dams and levees, how we arrange our daylight hours affects everyone on a daily basis as we try to squeeze in everything from Little League practice to evening walks before dark.

“We love having the daylight,” said Jeff Canter, president of the 700-strong Santa Teresa Little League in South San Jose.

Starting Monday, Canter said, practice start times move from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m., bringing some relief to parent volunteers rushing to the field from work. At the beginning of the season, when the 4 p.m. start times are announced, he said, “You should hear the collective groan from the parents. Their eyes bulge out and they go, `How am I supposed to do that?’ We say, ‘Look, it’s just for the first month. When the time change takes place, we can move it back to 5, 5:30.'”

Even with the gradually lengthening days, he said, the teams count on that final hour of sunlight.

On spring and summer evenings, you can find Elaine Brooks, a retired Oakland teacher, strolling around Lake Merritt. She looks forward to the extra hour of sunlight — and looks back fondly on the long summer days of her childhood.

Like many unaware of the federal law, Brooks wondered why Chu’s solution was to adopt standard time, rather than the other way around. But putting the question on a statewide ballot would be a “very low priority” compared to other issues sure to await Californians, she said.

Farmers are often invoked in discussions of daylight saving time — sometimes as the reason for the practice. But today, the matter falls very, very low on their list of priorities, said Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation, which has not taken a position on the measure.

California farmers and ranchers face many pressing questions — on water, immigration and employment policy, environmental regulation and more,” Kranz wrote in an email. “But as far as we can tell, changing to daylight saving time and back does not appear to be among those pressing questions.”