Committee Asks Staff to Study AT&T Landline Retirement After Former Mayor Cites Eaton Fire

A Pasadena City Council committee on Monday asked city staff to look into AT&T’s plans to retire its copper landlines after former Mayor Bill Paparian, citing the Eaton Fire, urged the city to call for independent proof that replacement phone service works when the power is out and residents are evacuating.

The Legislative Policy Committee did not vote on the resolution Paparian requested. Councilmember Steve Madison, who chairs the committee, asked staff to find out what the city did when the issue surfaced in 2024 and to check with police, fire and others with an interest in emergency communications. No date was set for the item to return.

“It’s not a frivolous inquiry at all,” Madison said.

AT&T is challenging California’s landline rules in federal court and before the Federal Communications Commission. Those rules require AT&T to offer basic phone service to anyone in its territory who asks for it, though not necessarily over copper. In June 2024, the California Public Utilities Commission dismissed with prejudice AT&T’s application to be relieved of that obligation, finding that no other carrier of last resort served AT&T’s territory and none had volunteered to replace it.

On June 29, the Federal Communications Commission cleared an AT&T application to discontinue copper-based residential phone service to about 184,000 customers in portions of 360 California wire centers on or after June 1, 2027. On July 16, U.S. District Judge Linda Lopez denied AT&T’s request to suspend the state rules while its lawsuit proceeds.

Paparian, who was mayor from 1995 to 1997, described Kinneloa Mesa, an unincorporated Los Angeles County community outside Pasadena’s city limits, as his neighborhood, and wrote to the committee that he was evacuated during the Eaton Fire on January 7, 2025.

“What I’m asking the city to say is narrower than the lawsuit,” Paparian said. Before copper is removed from a neighborhood like his, he said, someone other than AT&T should be able to show that the replacement works while the power is out and people are being evacuated.

Phillip Leclair, the city’s acting assistant city manager, told the committee the city has no regulatory role over AT&T’s service and that the copper service remains available. Citing research by the city’s state legislative advocate, he said Pasadena is not among the first areas where AT&T is trying to move faster. No wire center named for Pasadena appears among the 360 in AT&T’s residential application; wire centers named Arcadia and South Pasadena-Mission do.

AT&T told the Federal Communications Commission that its copper network serves 3 percent of California households in its service territory and costs $1 billion a year to maintain. “No customer will be left without access to phone or 911 service,” an AT&T spokesperson told Light Reading in July. The California Public Utilities Commission and consumer advocates told the Federal Communications Commission that California had not approved AT&T’s replacement service, AT&T Phone-Advanced, as a complete substitute for copper landlines.

Madison recalled conducting a welfare check with his son in Linda Vista during the Eaton Fire because police had no one available.

“It’s very elemental, the ability to communicate,” he said. “We’re actually very fragile if we can’t do it as we saw last year.”