Umm, it appears that timesyncd is NOT a part of MATE 16.04 Pi. rm /etc/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service yields:
cannot remove '/etc/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service' : No such file or directory
So now I'm still baffled what is killing NTP. This may all be for naught, I read something about NTP not being able to grab time from GPSD at boot because it takes too long to sync. Sigh. Not sure a Pi is ideal for a mobile setup. It's too much of a hassle having to reset time and location every time I power up. Back to the drawing board.
Also knro, I tried sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata and was in the right timezone.