Who owns the water service line in Cerritos, CA
The City supplies the water across the whole city and keeps the service and the meter as its own, with a repair duty attached. Section 13.04.070(f) provides that "All water services and water meters installed or caused to be installed shall remain at all times the property of the city and shall be maintained, repaired and renewed by the water division when rendered unserviceable by normal wear and tear". This is Cerritos's own statement.
Which part of the pipe is yours
Yours from the meter to your building
Why, and what to do
Where the responsibility divides
- Cerritos
- The water service and the meter, from the main to the meter, as property and as a repair duty. Section 13.04.010 defines the service connection as "piping, valves, meters, boxes and other division owned materials and equipment used for delivering water from the main to the customer", and section 13.04.070(f) commits the water division to maintain, repair and renew it when it wears out in ordinary use.
- The property owner
- The pipework from the meter into the property, starting with the first valve on your side of it. Section 13.04.070(e) reserves the City's own shut-off valves and service cocks "for the use of the city" and requires that "all customers shall provide their own valves and shut-off cocks between the water meter and the first outlet placed by the customer".
- What else is worth knowing
- The City's repair duty is written for ordinary wear, and the same subsection draws the line at what the customer causes. Section 13.04.070(f) provides that where replacements, repairs or adjustments of a meter are made necessary "by any act resulting from malice, carelessness or neglect of the customer", or by damage from hot water or steam, they are charged to the customer. So a meter that simply fails is the City's to renew, and one damaged from your side of it may not be. Do not touch the City's own shut-off valve either: section 13.04.070(e) says it "shall not be used or molested in any way or manipulated by the customer, except in extreme emergency", which is why the code requires you to have your own. On who serves you, the City's own code settles it for almost everyone: section 13.04.030 fixes the water division's service area as "that area which is within the city boundaries".
What Cerritos 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.
Cerritos has classified more of its service lines than most of California: 0.00% of its lines are unclassified, against 9.2% statewide.
- 15,664
- 0 (0.00%)
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.
- Classified does not mean inspected. Across California only 22% of service lines were established by field inspection; most of 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
The sewer lateral leaving your property is a separate pipe, run by a separate authority, and who is responsible for it is decided separately. In many places the two answers are opposites.
Sewer lateral requirements in Cerritos, 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.