Who owns the water service line in Glendale, CA
Glendale Water & Power furnishes, installs and maintains every water service connection in the city - and the charges for putting one in are the property owner's. The meter is the department's, which owns and installs it. That is the opposite of Glendale's sewer answer, where the owner maintains the run under the road. This is Glendale's own statement.
Which part of the pipe is yours
Nobody has put this in writing
What is knownYours all the way to the main, including the fitting where it joins
Why, and what to do
Where the responsibility divides
- Glendale
- Every service connection. Section 13.16.010 states that "the department shall furnish, install and maintain all service connections and the charges for these facilities shall be at the expense of the owner of the premises" - so the department does the installing and the maintaining, while the cost of installation falls on the owner. The meter is the department's outright: the code defines it as "the measuring device that the department owns and installs for the purpose of reading and recording the amount of water consumed by the premises".
- The property owner
- The plumbing inside the premises, on the ordinary reading rather than on a sentence the City wrote. Glendale's water title never defines "service connection", so there is no published point at which the department's side ends. What the code does state is that the department maintains the service connections and owns the meter, that the owner bears the charges for installing one, and where the City draws its own risk: it "shall not be liable for the cost of water or any damage to persons or property caused in any manner by the use of water beyond its meters, or inside or within the customer's property line if the meters are not located within the public right-of-way".
- What else is worth knowing
- The division here is not where most water answers divide. Glendale Water & Power maintains the service connection - you do not arrange that work or pay for its upkeep - but the charges for installing a connection "shall be at the expense of the owner of the premises", so a new or upgraded service is your cost even though the department does the work, at a schedule of charges adopted by council resolution and held at the department rather than printed in the code. Ask for that schedule before assuming a figure. Note also that the meter is the department's own, which it owns and installs, and that your other pipe answers the other way entirely: the same City makes the sewer house connection yours to maintain, wye or saddle at the main included. One last thing, and read it for what it is. The nearest the code comes to drawing a line is a clause about what the City will not be blamed for: damage from water used "beyond its meters", or past your property line where the meter is not in the public right-of-way. That tells you where Glendale puts its own risk, and it is the best signal in the code - but a clause about liability is not a statement about who owns or repairs the pipe, and it should not be read as one. If the leak is out towards the street, ring Glendale Water & Power and ask them to tell you which side of it you are on.
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.
- This authority's service line inventory - the record of which pipes are lead, and where - has not been matched here yet. Ask the utility for yours.
Your other pipe has a different answer
For the sewer lateral, Glendale gives the opposite answer to the one above:
The property owner pays to maintain the house connection, and in Glendale that means the run under the road: the code defines a house connection as the part "extending from the sewer main in a public street or right-of-way to private property", and makes the owner responsible for it "including the wye or saddle at the sewer main".
One of the two authorities does not say where its side ends, so the two answers cannot be compared here.
Who pays for the sewer lateral in Glendale, 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.