Copper wire theft that’s darkened streetlights have discouraged teenagers in St. Paul’s North End from playing basketball at their local courts, caused older couples to discontinue early-morning walks around Como Lake and led to local shops struggling to attract customers because people felt unwelcome on the dim sidewalks.

“Then on Christmas Eve of 2023, the unthinkable happened,” said Rep. Athena Hollins, DLF-St. Paul. A driver fatally struck Steven Wirtz, a 64-year-old retired Marine, as he walked his dog across a North End street that was pitch black due to copper wire theft.

“That was the moment that I realized that copper wire theft is more than a mere inconvenience or perpetual infrastructure expense,” Hollins said Monday. “It’s a public safety crisis.”

Since January, Hollins said she’s paired with the city of St. Paul “to work on legislative solutions for this crisis, one that we believe will curb the selling of illegally-obtained copper without overburdening the scrap metal industry.”

She and Sen. Sandy Pappas, DFL-St. Paul, are sponsoring bills that are due to be heard in legislative committees Monday and Tuesday.

The legislation would require anyone selling copper metal to have a license issued by the state. People licensed to perform electrical work are deemed to hold a license. The bills would still allow residents and businesses to recycle copper materials with scrap metal companies for free.

The top shows regular copper wire and the bottom is stripped wire. (Mara H. Gottfried / Pioneer Press)

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and 37 other mayors signed onto a letter dated Sunday, urging the Senate and House commerce committees to support the bills. “We represent communities as far away as Virginia on the Iron Range, as large as Minneapolis and as small as Gem Lake,” Carter said.

“We’ve seen how successful state policy can be through the work on curbing catalytic converter theft through registration and accountability,” he said. “We can do the same thing with copper wire.”

St. Paul Public Works spent more than $1 million to fix street lights and traffic signals damaged by copper wire theft. That’s 10 times the amount from 2019, when the cost to Public Works was just over $100,000.

The problem continues to extend to other sources — “they’re going after traffic signals, which is incredibly dangerous,” Public Works Director Sean Kershaw said last month. “They’re going after phone systems, they’re going after utility vaults, they’re going after HVAC systems” and charging stations for electric vehicles.

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