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Who owns the water service line in Paramount, CA

Which part of the pipe is yours

your buildingproperty linesidewalkstreetmain
The thick length is yours.

If something’s wrong

Who to call first about the water service line

BelowGrid has no first-call guidance on file from Paramount about the water service line.

The documents this answer is built on

Who is responsible for which part

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.

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.

Sources

Paramount Municipal Code section 13.04.260, Service connections, meters and customer's facilities

Also quoted:

Checked

What Paramount reported to the State about service-line materials

Federal rules required every community water system to inventory its service lines and publish the result. These are the figures this one filed.

The inventory records what each line is made of: lead, galvanized requiring replacement, non-lead, or lead status unknown. “Still unclassified” counts the lines whose material has not been identified. It does not mean they are lead.

Paramount has classified more of its service lines than most of California: 0.00% of its lines are unclassified, against 9.2% statewide.

Service lines reported
7,521
Still unclassified
0 (0.00%)
Across California, 9.2% of service lines are unclassified.
Share of service lines still unclassified
  • Paramount0.00%
  • California9.2%

What this page cannot 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.
  • The State's service area map puts effectively all of Paramount's land inside the boundary it maps for the city's own water system. Within the same city limits it also maps "GSWC - HOLLYDALE" (3%). Measured 25 Sep 2026.
  • 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 4 Sep 2026. They may not reflect its current inventory - ask the water system to confirm anything about a specific address.
Paramount: official site

Your other pipe: the sewer lateral

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.

Same trench, separate authorities, decided separately.

Who pays for the sewer lateral in Paramount, CA

Look up a specific address

This page describes what applies to properties in Paramount in general. To see which authorities serve one address, and what records exist for it, search for it.

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How this compares across California