Who owns the water service line in Paramount, CA
The City supplies the water, owns the service connection and meter, and says in its own code that it pays to maintain them. Section 13.04.260(C) provides that "All service connections, meters and valves, and housings installed by the City or conveyed to the City, however provided for, shall be the sole property of the City under the control of the City and will be maintained at the City's expense except as otherwise provided in these regulations". This is Paramount'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
- Paramount
- The service connection, the meter and the housing, as property and as a cost the City carries. Section 13.04.090 adds that the City's property "includes all meters and appliances, service pipe, lines and mains installed by the City whether on public property or property of the consumer", and that it "may be only repaired, replaced or removed as the City shall so direct". Section 13.04.110 puts the meter itself, wherever practicable, "in a meter box in the roadside area".
- The property owner
- Everything on the customer's side of that connection. Section 13.04.420(A) requires the customer, "at his or her own risk and expense", to "furnish, install and keep in good and safe condition all apparatus and appliances which may be required for receiving, controlling, applying and utilizing such water", and subsection (B) adds that "Each customer shall at all times maintain in good repair all water pipes, faucets, plumbing fixtures, and other water appliances".
- What else is worth knowing
- Two things are worth knowing before relying on this. The first is the qualifier inside the City's own promise: section 13.04.260(C) maintains the connection at the City's expense "except as otherwise provided in these regulations", and the very next subsection holds the customer responsible for loss or damage to the City's meters or other facilities resulting from the use or operation of appliances and facilities on the customer's premises. So ordinary wear is the City's, and damage your side causes may not be. The second is who bills you. The State's own service-area register puts the City system over almost all of Paramount, and a thin edge of the city along South Gate is also within Golden State Water Company's Hollydale system. If Golden State bills you, its tariff governs your service rather than these sections.
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, Paramount gives the opposite answer to the one above:
Paramount writes no sewer ownership rule of its own and borrows the County's. Section 13.08.010 of its municipal code adopts "Title 20, Utilities, Division 2 of the Los Angeles County Code, commonly referred to as the Sanitary Sewers and Industrial Waste Ordinance as amended July 27, 1989" as the City's ordinance. Inside that adopted division, section 20.24.080 provides that all house laterals "shall be maintained by the owner of the property served in a safe and sanitary condition", and section 20.20.130 defines a "house lateral" as "that part of the sewer piping within the street or right-of-way which extends from the property or sewer right-of-way line to a construction with the main-line sewer". The length the City's ordinance puts on the owner is the length under the road.
Your sewer lateral is yours to the main; your water line stops being yours at the meter.
Who pays for the sewer lateral in Paramount, 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.