copper wire theft<\/a> has hit agricultural and commercial business owners in the area especially hard.<\/p>\n\u201cOne of the biggest reasons why we have to do this is that when businesses and farms get hit and they have to absorb that cost, that cost gets passed on to working families in this community,\u201d said Fresno Councilmember Mike Karbassi. \u201cWorking families are the ones bearing the burden because it raises the cost of food, it raises the cost of goods, and unfortunately in these inflationary times we have to do our part to help relieve these issues for the residents of this county.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ordinance 25-008 was initially approved by the Fresno County Board of Supervisors in April 2025. It was submitted for review to Bonta in September 2025.<\/p>\n
Fresno County District Attorney Lisa Smittcamp said she wasn\u2019t sure why Bonta\u2019s opinion took eight months, but she cited backlogging and understaffing as possible reasons. \u201cI know that we were relentless in, just, every 30 days contacting them to say, \u2018Hey, have you made a decision?\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Smittcamp said the ordinance would broaden the scope of the current California penal code to make it easier to prosecute copper wire thieves. Between the end of 2025 and the present day, at least three copper wire theft cases were submitted to the District Attorney\u2019s office. Now that the ordinance has been approved by Bonta, two of those cases will be filed this week.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoing forward, we\u2019re hoping, you know, that we\u2019ll have more cases coming in so that we can put a lid on copper wire thieves and recyclers,\u201d Smittcamp said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new ordinance designed to make it more difficult to transport and sell stolen copper wire is now…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":340761,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[5737,112,622,114,113,2794],"class_list":["post-341182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fresno","tag-copper-wire","tag-fresno","tag-fresno-county","tag-fresno-headlines","tag-fresno-news","tag-rob-bonta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/340761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}