Bonta opinion clears Fresno County to fully enforce copper theft ordinance
Bonta’s opinion gave Fresno County a green light to prosecute copper theft countywide, with three cases already lined up and more than $3 million in past damage on the books.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has cleared Fresno County to fully enforce its copper theft ordinance, ending nearly a year of uncertainty and giving prosecutors a sharper tool against a crime that has caused outages, farm delays, repair bills and public safety risks across the county.
District Attorney Lisa Smittcamp said her office already has two cases ready to file and a third that needs more evidence, underscoring that Fresno County is treating the opinion as immediate enforcement, not a symbolic win. Smittcamp had waited for formal approval before moving ahead, while Fresno City Attorney Andrew Janz had pressed forward under the ordinance earlier, a split that showed how local officials handled the same legal question very differently.
The ordinance began moving on April 8, 2025, when supervisors Garry Bredefeld and Nathan Magsig introduced Ordinance No. 25-008 with support from Sheriff John Zanoni, City of Fresno officials, the Fresno Chamber of Commerce, AT&T and the Fresno County Farm Bureau. County leaders said then that copper wire theft had caused more than $3 million in damage to commercial operations in Fresno County in 2023. The board later allowed the ordinance to take effect on April 22, 2025, and deputies were reported able to cite or arrest suspects found with more than 10 pounds of copper wire they believed was stolen.
Bonta’s office had already flagged the issue as a statewide problem. In a June 5, 2025 bulletin, the attorney general said copper theft and related vandalism had left neighborhoods in the dark, disrupted telecommunication and utility systems, hit business and agricultural operations, and threatened public safety. The California Department of Justice also said the telecom industry reported nearly 6,000 copper theft and infrastructure vandalism incidents nationwide between June and December 2024, including 1,805 in California.
The legal fight over Fresno County’s ordinance stayed open into October 2025, when the attorney general’s monthly opinion report listed Smittcamp’s request as pending on whether Ordinance No. 25-008 was preempted by state law. Bonta’s opinion now says the county’s rule is not coextensive with state law, opening the door for enforcement countywide.
That matters in Fresno County, where agriculture and infrastructure are tightly linked. The county says it has 1.88 million acres of farmland, nearly half of its 3.84 million total acres, so copper theft can ripple from irrigation pumps and processing sites to utility lines and telecom networks. Smittcamp has said she wants to push for a broader version statewide, and she plans to reach out to state Sen. Shannon Grove and Assemblymember David Tangipa.
For Fresno County, the question now is not whether copper theft is real. It is whether the ordinance can finally do what local leaders said it was built to do: make the penalties match the damage.
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