Exposed Year Filter in View; date range has too many years

I have a view that has an exposed filter based on a Date field, displaying just the year. It works great, except it shows the +3-3 year range so with 2011 as the central year, the list displays years 2008-2014. Problem is, there are no articles for 2008 nor for 20014. Does anyone know how to set this so that the only years that display are the years we have news articles for? I tried changing the Date Published field "Years back and forward:" to "-1:+1" but that didn't make any difference. I'm thinking this is a default in Drupal theme? any help would be appreciated.