Who owns the water service line in Ceres, CA
Ceres draws the line at the meter and states both halves. Section 13.02.020 provides that "The City shall be responsible for operating, maintaining, and replacing all portions of the water system and water facilities which are owned by the City", and section 13.02.070 that "The customer shall be responsible for the proper operation and maintenance of the customer's private water line". This is Ceres's own statement.
Which part of the pipe is yours
Yours from the meter to your building
Why, and what to doYours all the way to the main under the road
Why, and what to do
Where the responsibility divides
- Ceres
- The service connection from the main through the meter, as property and as a duty to maintain and replace. Section 13.02.040 provides that any portion of the distribution system, "including any water main, service connection or meter which is located in City property, the public right-of-way or in easements, shall be under the exclusive control of the City and owned, managed and operated under the direction of the Director". Section 13.01.040 defines the metered service connection as including "the tap, meter, meter box, pipe, corporation stop, curb stop or shut-off valve".
- The property owner
- The private water line - everything after the meter. Section 13.01.040 defines it as "the portion of the distribution system located on the customer's side of the metered service connection", and section 13.02.070 also makes the customer responsible for damage "or loss or waste of water resulting from the customer's private water line".
- What else is worth knowing
- The City's side is what it owns and nothing more, and the customer answers for what a leak on the private side does - including damage to the City's system or to a neighbour's property under section 13.02.070. Check the name on your water bill first: the City's system is the main supplier in Ceres, but not every address is on it, and a small part of the city is served by the City of Modesto's system, whose own rules apply there.
What Ceres has told the State
Federal rules required every community water system to inventory its service lines and publish the result. These are the figures this one filed.
Ceres has classified less of its network than most of California: 42.9% of its service lines are still unclassified, against 9.2% statewide.
- 11,842
- 5,080 (42.9%)
- 182
What this does not tell you
- This describes who is responsible for which part of the pipe. It is not a record of what your own service line is made of.
- Unclassified means nobody has established what the pipe is made of. It does not mean lead was found.
- Classified does not mean inspected, and this system inspected less than most. Ceres established 8.3% of its classifications by field inspection, against 22% across California; the rest come from records, the year of construction, or a predictive model.
- These figures were submitted to the State by the water system itself and were read on 2026-09-04. They may not reflect its current inventory - the system's own page is the place to confirm anything about a specific address.
Your other pipe has a different answer
For the sewer lateral, Ceres gives the opposite answer to the one above:
Ceres puts the whole lateral on the owner and says so twice. Section 13.14.040 defines a house connection as "a privately owned and maintained residential sewer pipe conveying sewage from a single building or premises to its connection with a main line", and section 13.15.030 provides that "The City shall not be responsible for the repair, maintenance, cleaning or replacement of a lateral sewer."
Your sewer lateral is yours to the main; your water line stops being yours at the meter.
Who pays for the sewer lateral in Ceres, CAHow this compares across California
- Why your two pipes disagree — the places where the sewer and water authorities contradict each other about the run beneath the road.
- Which water systems know what is buried — how much of each California system’s network the utility can actually identify.