House takes aim at wire thieves

Albuquerque Police Department Officer George Trujillo shows a bar that locked up a transformer box stripped of its wires outside a vacant building on Education Place on the city’s West Side. He said there were over 600 metal theft incidents in the area last year. (jim thompson/journal)

The New Mexico House of Representatives took aim at cable and wire thieves Wednesday, voting 60-0 to approve a bill raising the crime to the level of a felony if it results in a power failure that affects the public.

But the measure’s future is uncertain: An identical bill in the Senate was tabled by the Judiciary Committee in a 5-5 vote last week amid concerns by some members that it would be too harsh.

Mike Sindelar, a detective assigned to the rural crimes unit of the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office and a member of a statewide metal theft task force, said current law only allows someone to be charged for the actual value of the stolen material.

“If they steal a piece of copper or piece of cable that is worth $100, you’re looking at a petty misdemeanor,” he said. “But it may result in a disruption of service that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair and replace.”

House Bill 57 and its counterpart, Senate Bill 28, would make it a felony to steal telecommunications, utility or railroad signalizing cable or hardware that results in an outage affecting the public. It would be a fourth-degree felony if the cost to restore power is $20,000 or less, and a third-degree felony for amounts more than that.

“I think either bill is critical to the well-being of the citizens of New Mexico,” said Loretta Armenta, state director of regulatory and governmental affairs for CenturyLink New Mexico, which is among the business, utilities, law enforcement and other groups lobbying for the measure. “We constantly worry – our utilities, railroads – there’s going to be an accident, someone can’t get through due to an outage, and someone’s life is impacted.”

The House bill now goes to the Senate – and probably back to the same committee that tabled SB 28.

PNM, which tracked about 150 incidents involving its system and customers last year, supports the measure. Spokeswoman Susan Sponar said when outages occur, there are far-reaching “ripple” effects.

“A business may not be able to reopen immediately, the customers they serve may not be able to get the services they need, employees may lose wages, insurance may go up,” she said.

The problem of wire theft isn’t as bad as it was, due to stricter regulations for recyclers, more-focused law enforcement and greater public awareness.

But police and businesses like CenturyLink and PNM say it remains a dangerous and costly problem – and they’re still seeing a lot of it, copper being the favorite target.

“It’s not at the rate it was in 2011,” Gonzales said. “But it does continue, and it continues to put our customers at risk.” Backers of HB 57, sponsored by Rep. Debbie Rodella, D-Española, and SB 28 by Sen. Steve Neville, R-Farmington, say the measure falls in line with recent legislative efforts to strengthen the state’s laws on metal theft.

“We wanted to try to get the message out there we’re getting tired of it and we need to stop it,” Neville said. The oil and gas fields he represents are particular targets of the thieves.

Proponents originally sought to make cable theft resulting in an outage a second- or third-degree felony, depending on restoration costs, but the crime level was lowered to try to address concerns raised by some senators that the penalty was excessive, Sindelar said.

Fellow Democrats Joseph Cervantes of Las Cruces, Linda Lopez and Cisco McSorley of Albuquerque and Peter Wirth of Santa Fe joined Senate Majority leader Michael Sanchez of Belen in voting to stall the measure.

Messages left with them seeking comment were not immediately returned Wednesday.

“They thought it would be too hard to be putting people in jail, that sometimes they’re disadvantaged, and it stays on their record,” said Neville. “The realities are we have pre-prosecutorial programs and all kinds of things where people can stay out of jail, or even avoid having the felony on their records if they’re willing to take certain steps ahead of time.”

Albuquerque Police Department Officer George Trujillo believes most wire thieves are drug abusers trying to support their habits.

He said there were over 600 incidents in the metro area last year.

“For the month of January, we’re pretty close to 50″ reports of incidents, he said in a recent interview. “Just to give you an idea, today we had a residential house that was vacant. The guy went in and took all the copper piping out of it. We had another house where they went into the attic and they took all the heating piping in it.”
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal