The original version of the site I launched had this code in the dbcommon.php file
putenv("TZ=US/Eastern");
When I upgraded to PHPRunner 5.1 (I'm guessing this was the cause) my dbcommon.php no longer has this call, and the application defaults to the server time in php.ini instead. I can not change the php.ini file, so for the time being I manually added that code back into dbcommon.php, but I would like to include it in my project so I don't have to remember every time I build.