San Joaquin County, CA Business Licensing & Operations: Secondhand Dealers (2026)

The license required by § 7-1152 is not a standalone junk permit. The section points back to the county's existing business license provisions at Sections 7-1000 through 7-1012, or the Chapter 1(b) provisions at Sections 7-1025 through 7-1036, and then applies them as modified by this chapter. In practice a San Joaquin County scrap operator pulls a business or peddler license under those sections and takes on the junk chapter's extra conditions on top of it.

What counts as junk is defined broadly at Sec. 7-1150: secondhand or used machinery, ferrous and nonferrous scrap metals and alloys, and secondhand furniture or personal property. That definition catches more operators than the word junkyard suggests. A buyer of scrap copper and aluminum, a used machinery reseller, and a secondhand furniture dealer are all inside it, and § 7-1152 covers all three business forms it names, including the itinerate junk peddler who works out of a truck rather than a fixed yard.

Three obligations do most of the regulatory work. Sec. 7-1153 requires fingerprints and photographs of every person who manages the business or buys junk for it, so the counter staff doing the buying are covered and not just the licensee. Sec. 7-1157 requires a report to the Sheriff each week listing every junk purchase and sale from the prior seven days, filed every Monday by noon, which means recordkeeping has to be continuous rather than reconstructed at year end. Sec. 7-1158 imposes a fourteen-day holding period before purchased junk can be resold, so material bought on a Tuesday cannot be moved on, melted, or shipped out for 14 days. Read together, the weekly report and the 14-day hold give the Sheriff a written record of an item and a window in which the item is still physically on site.

Sec. 7-1163 closes the chapter's age gap by barring purchases from any seller under 18, so a dealer has to establish the seller's age before taking material in.