Who owns the water service line in Lynwood, CA
The City supplies the water and puts both the ownership and the repair duty in enacted law rather than on a webpage. Section 14-1.17 provides that "The city's responsibility for all water service lines is from the connection at the city's main water line to the water meter box", and that "From the water meter box to the customer's premises is the sole responsibility of the customer to install, own, maintain, and/or replace". This is Lynwood'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
- Lynwood
- Everything from the main to the meter box, and the City claims the repair right as well as the title. Section 14-1.19 provides that "Said connection pipe, meter box, meter and property stop are and shall be the property of the city, which retains the sole right to maintain, repair and service said facilities". Section 14-1.1 fixes where that run ends by defining the service line as "that portion of water service pipe from the main line up to and including the discharge side of the water meter" - so the meter is the City's and the handover is at its outlet.
- The property owner
- The pipework from the meter box to the building, and section 14-1.17 spells out that this covers the whole life of it - the customer's is the sole responsibility "to install, own, maintain, and/or replace". There is no shared portion and no condition on it.
- What else is worth knowing
- The thing to check before relying on any of this is whose name is on your bill. Section 14-1.5 makes the City the sole supplier in Lynwood "with the exception of the area currently served by the Park Water district" - that district is now Liberty Utilities, and the State's own service-area register puts it over about eight per cent of the city, a compact block in the south-eastern corner. A small edge of the city is also within the Paramount city system. If Liberty or Paramount bills you, the city sections above do not govern your service at all - your own supplier's rules do, and for Liberty those are a tariff filed with the Public Utilities Commission rather than a city ordinance. For everyone the City bills, those sections are unusually complete: most utilities state ownership and leave the repair duty to a customer page that can be reworded without a filing, whereas Lynwood enacted both.
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, Lynwood gives the opposite answer to the one above:
Lynwood writes its own rule rather than borrowing the County's, and writes it in one sentence. Section 14-15.3 of the municipal code provides that "Sewer laterals between the buildings and the connection to the public sewer are owned and maintained by the property owner served by the lateral". Ownership and maintenance are assigned together, which is less common than it sounds - most codes assign one and leave the other to be argued.
Your sewer lateral is yours to the main; your water line stops being yours at the meter.
Who pays for the sewer lateral in Lynwood, 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.