Local Mayor Announces City Will Switch to Metric Time After Realizing Regular Time 'Too Confusing for Voters'

SPRINGFIELD, IL—In a bold move to modernize municipal operations and increase civic engagement, Mayor Patricia Windham announced Tuesday that the city will officially adopt metric time beginning January 1st, claiming that the current system of 24-hour days is "unnecessarily complicated and frankly discriminatory against people who didn't go to fancy clock-reading schools."

Under the new system, each day will consist of exactly 10 metric hours, with each hour containing 100 metric minutes, and each minute containing 100 metric seconds. City Hall will be the first to make the transition, with all municipal employees required to attend mandatory seminars on "temporal equity" and "chronological inclusivity."

"Look, I've been in politics for 15 years, and I can tell you that at least 60% of my constituents show up to meetings at the wrong time because they're confused by this archaic French Revolutionary calendar system we're still using," Windham explained during a press conference held at what she called "5.47 metric o'clock." "Why should we force hardworking Americans to deal with the arbitrary tyranny of 60-minute hours when we could have nice, clean 100-minute hours instead?"

Dr. Harold Ticksworth, a self-proclaimed chronology expert from the Springfield Institute of Temporal Studies, praised the mayor's initiative. "Traditional time is a relic of Big Clock's stranglehold on American society," Ticksworth stated while adjusting what appeared to be a calculator duct-taped to a sundial. "Mayor Windham is courageously standing up to the timepiece industrial complex that has kept us enslaved to their base-60 numerical schemes for far too long."

The announcement has drawn mixed reactions from residents. Local business owner Janet Fernsby expressed confusion about the change, asking, "Does this mean my store will be open for 4.2 metric hours instead of 8 regular hours? And will my employees still get metric lunch breaks?"

Meanwhile, city councilman Robert "Big Bob" Henderson voiced strong opposition to the proposal. "This is just another example of the mayor's war on traditional American values," Henderson declared. "What's next, metric temperature? Metric birthdays? I was born in 1962, not metric-year 782, and I'll be damned if I'm going to start aging in base-10."

When asked about potential complications with neighboring cities that still use "legacy time," Mayor Windham dismissed such concerns. "Other municipalities will adapt or be left behind in the dust of temporal progress," she stated confidently. "Springfield is going to be the metric time capital of America, mark my words—or should I say, mark my metric words."

The city plans to install new metric clocks in all public buildings by December, purchased at a cost of $2.3 million from the mayor's brother-in-law's recently established business, Windham Temporal Solutions LLC.