“M

eridians were made for man, not man for meridians. Time must be regulated ... to suit man's convenience." Sir Robert Ball, eminent British astronomer, in support of William Willett's daylight saving time proposal "The Waste of Daylight," published in 1907.
      When Credit Suisse First Boston chose Research Triangle Park for its new complex, one of the criteria mentioned was the need to stay on the Eastern U.S. seaboard in order not to stray too far from the time zone of the company's London offices. That point has frequently been raised in conjunction with corporate relocations to Atlantic Canada too, where the clocks run yet another hour later than Eastern time.
      When Fluor Corp. announced in May 2005 that it would move its corporate headquarters from Southern California to Dallas-Ft. Worth, Chairman and CEO Alan L. Boeckmann said, "While we highly value our West Coast clients, most of our North American customers are clustered in Texas and on the East Coast, which can be more efficiently accessed from the central time zone."
      A proposal is pending in Congress to extend the dates the nation follows DST. It's just the latest in an ongoing battle between timekeeping and the pace of clustered commerce. And as usual, Indiana is battle central.

      At a Site Selection-sponsored Indiana roundtable discussion in 2002, then-Lieutenant Gov. Joe Kernan promised, "We're not going to assign blame, we're just going to fix it." Was he responding to complaints about property taxes, road conditions or regulatory compliance? No. He was responding to multinational corporate executives seated at that table who were calling for "some sort of consistency in the time zones," which without that solution were frequently "an unnecessary complication and a nuisance."
      Kernan, later thrust into the governor's mansion upon the untimely death of Gov. Frank O'Bannon in September 2003, lost a hard-fought election battle to Mitch Daniels in the fall of 2004. And one of the things Daniels pledged to fix was Indiana's time-zone hodge-podge.
      Better later than never. In late April 2005, the Indiana legislature officially recognized daylight saving time (DST) for the whole of the state. But now the real battle begins over which time zone — Eastern (EST) or Central (CST) — the state's 92 counties should occupy. The legislation requires that the U.S. Dept. of Transportation hold hearings across the state to help it determine its course. While it does not state a preference, the new law advises the DOT that the 10 counties close to Chicago and Evansville would certainly like to stay on Chicago time (CST), while those near the metros of Louisville, Ky., and Cincinnati, Ohio, should stay on EST.
      Oddly enough, it was a state legislator from Vincennes, Rep. Troy Woodruff, who cast the deciding vote for DST in April 2005. A Republican, he hails from a southwest Indiana area that has historically fought against DST. Now the issue that his Republican governor fought hard to push through may be a thorn in the side of the Republicans' narrow majority (52-48) in the state legislature. Woodruff said he just wanted to see the state move forward. Whether it moves forward with Cincinnati or Chicago remains to be seen.
      In the meantime, just the move to adopt statewide Daylight Saving Time may be having a positive effect. Part of Gov. Daniels' rationale for the change was that companies might consider it enough of a nuisance to bypass the state; the decision by Kohl's in 2000 to build a warehouse in Cincinnati was thus ascribed. FedEx in 2004 said its annual losses stemming from dealing with Indiana's time zone mishmash amounted to $1.5 million, and Indy-based trucking company Celadon's CEO told Indianapolis Business Journal he spent $250,000 a year because of missed or late shipments caused by Indiana time confusion.
      Nevertheless, geography frequently trumps the clock, as the greater Indianapolis region has become a trucking and logistics hub for the nation. In late May, dry food ingredient manufacturer PacMoore chose nearby Mooresville, Ind., as the site of its new $8.8-million, 110,000-sq.-ft. (10,219-sq.-m.) manufacturing and warehouse facility.

     It says something about the importance of time zones that the lines separating one time from another so frequently overlay boundary lines separating counties, states and provinces. But what is the relationship between having a time difference line running through a region and the ability of communities on either side of it to attract corporate projects? A look at large corporate building project data from the Conway Data New Plant Database in U.S. counties near the Eastern/Central time zone split between 1996 and 2004 shows a predominant pattern in line with the Department of Transportation's chief "convenience of commerce" criterion. Look, for example, at where that timeline comes ashore from Lake Michigan in Indiana. Evaluated over a span that runs from 1996-2004, St. Joseph County, anchored by South Bend, shows a healthy number of projects. A pronounced dip occurs in neighboring Laporte County, anchored by Michigan City. But move one more notch west to Porter County and an increasingly Chicago-centric economy jumps the tally higher than both of the others combined.
      Sometimes a project creates a timeless economy unto itself. In southwest Indiana, Knox County, Ind., home to Vincennes University and hard by the Illinois border defined by the Wabash River, has held its own on EST. But Gibson County -part of the CST cluster around Evansville, has seen nearly twice as many projects, nearly all related to Toyota's plant in Princeton.
      Follow the jagged boundary line down the map through Kentucky and Tennessee, and not a whole lot of large towns surface along its route, repelled like opposing magnets by the idea of being two-timed. Green County, on Kentucky's CST side, has seen a dearth of projects, while Taylor County, buoyed by the city of Campbellsville, has enjoyed many times more. Further south, in the houseboat industry territory of Lake Cumberland, Wayne County (CST), anchored by the town of Monticello, and Pulaski County, moored to the EST economy of Somerset, have both seen steady project flow over the years.
      Georgia and Alabama can play off time zone differences against each other, as they benefit by having the line follow the course of the state line. That line is defined eventually by the Chattahoochee and then the Apalachicola rivers as it meanders into Florida just west of Tallahassee. And just as it peters out into the Gulf, it does something it hasn't done the whole way south: Bisect a county. It's Gulf County, home to the original Port St. Joe, as well as White City, which is itself bisected by that timeline.
      The county has not seen many projects in the past decade, although its primarily tourist economic base is undergirded by the seafood processing and chemical industries. Per capita income was just under $18,000 in 2000, well under the Florida average of $29,451. But the county shows a healthy population growth curve of 35 percent between 1990 and 2004, as it pushes the 16,000 barrier. The region's slogan? "Florida's Forgotten Coast."
      "Personally, having lived adjacent to the time boundary most of my life, it only seems to affect those who are setting up meetings," writes Bruce Ballister, regional planner — economic development for the Apalachee Regional Planning Council. That amounts to pretty near everybody. The EST resident finds the lateness of getting home from evening meetings on CST balanced by easily making those CST morning meetings.

      As the above map demonstrates, the boundaries of time over the course of time have proved as fungible as those of parcel boundaries. And as anybody in economic development can attest, those lines get "corrected" by the daily flow of commerce, not some astronomical standard.
      Bill Mosley, public affairs specialist with the U.S. DOT's office of general counsel for regulation and enforcement, says, "We have some standard procedures for time zone boundary change requests." But the procedures for Indiana are under review "because they did not propose a specific time zone. We have to see how our procedures fit with this particular request."
      Mosley says petitions for time zone boundary changes come every few years, with the most recent coming in late 2003 for areas in North Dakota and South Dakota.
      In that instance, at the request of the Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners for Sioux County, N.D., at 2 a.m. on October 26, 2003, all of the county east of State Highway 31 came into Central Time, courtesy of the DOT.Like Gulf Co. in Florida, Sioux Co. was one of the few in the country to be split into two times. But once again, the operational convenience of commerce ruled the day, however you may choose to measure that day's passing:
      As a part of the petition for the change, county commissioners noted, "while Fort Yates operates on central time, a large part of the northern area of Sioux County, while technically being in the mountain time zone, already operates incorrectly on central time anyway."