Steven Freund just wants his landline back.

“Dec. 12, I got up, picked up the phone to make a phone call, and there wasn’t anything,” he recalls.

Since then, no dial tone, no rings and no service.

Freund, 76, who lives in the Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis, says he’s contacted his carrier, CenturyLink, multiple times with no luck.

“Every time you talk to them, they tell you your phones will be on at 11:59 and 11:59 never comes,” he notes. “All my doctors that would call me, or programs I’ve applied for, or people, just well-wishers for Christmas, they’d all be calling my landline. Nobody has my cell phone number because I don’t use it.”

He’s not the only one.

5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has received emails from seniors, people with disabilities and others who are worried that the lack of service is a safety issue.

“This landline issue makes it very hard for older/disabled folks to communicate,” one says.

“No landline. My father is 90 years old,” says another.

David Dusbabek, a neighbor of Freund’s, says he, too, hasn’t had service since mid-December.

“I’m pretty fed up with it myself,” he declares. “We’ve been through a lot of it, and what’s going to be next?”   

CenturyLink did not respond to KSTP’s questions on Saturday, but in an earlier email, the company said Freund’s outage is due to ‘multiple cases of copper theft.’  

RELATED: Copper thieves target landline phones in the metro

In a statement, CenturyLink said: “These crimes have severely hampered our ability to restore service due to the extensive damage during the theft. In some instances, we have repaired service only to be the victim of copper theft again in the same location.”

Dusbabek says his girlfriend spoke with their carrier about copper thefts and those who commit that crime.   

“They said they go down in the sewers; they lift up a manhole cover, and they just clear out anything that’s strung under the streets,” he explains.

Minneapolis police say they’re investigating at least one incident from mid-December in which copper wires were stolen from a manhole on 22^nd Avenue South.

St. Paul has long been grappling with thefts of copper wire from light poles, but now, landlines are being affected there, too.

St. Paul police are investigating the theft of two communications cables in the area of Minnehaha Avenue East and Flandrau Street after a CenturyLink employee reported an outage there.  

“The thieves will take any type of wire that they think has copper in it,” says Sean Kershaw, St Paul’s director of Public Works. “We’re now learning phone lines and so the landlines in several neighborhoods in St. Paul are down. So that means you can’t call 911 from a landline in that situation.”

The losses are costing both Minneapolis and St. Paul big bucks.

In a statement, St. Paul officials say more than $1.2 million has been spent to address copper wire theft, ‘often seeing the wire re-stolen within days.’

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey says the city has spent $545,000 replacing stolen copper wire.

A new state law that went into effect Jan. 1 requires a license for copper wire recycling.

It’s hoped that that measure will cut down on thefts.

“If they have to have a license to sell that, we think they’ll be less likely to steal it and that scrapyards will be less likely to purchase the stolen copper,” Kershaw says.

Freund says he just wants his phone service fixed and the thefts stopped.  

“When they’re stealing the copper, and losing somebody’s phone, if the person relies on that phone to call when they have a heart attack or if their house is burning… imagine yourself without your cell phone,” he says. “I’d like to be able to pick up my landline and speak to someone.”