U.S. Senator Charles Schumer was in Dickinson on Tuesday to discuss cracking down on metal theft. The senator announced a new bill that would regulate the buying and selling of metal. Schumer says that the two major issues that lead to metal theft, in particular copper theft, is the price of the metal and the difficulty to trace exchanges between customers and dealers or recyclers. The new bill requires documentation on where the metal came from, which makes it a federal crime to steal metal, and caps the amount a recycler can pay in cash at $100. Any transaction over $100 would be paid by check.
