Who pays for the sewer lateral in Pasadena, CA

This backwater test is one you can apply yourself. Milpitas and Burbank measure a floor or a fixture rim against the nearest upstream sewer structure or maintenance hole cover in the street; Pasadena measures against the curb outside your house, or your property line. If a basement lavatory, a floor drain or a garden-level shower sits lower than that, the section reaches it, and it reaches fixtures that are merely "located" below the line as well as newly installed ones, so an old house is not exempt by age. The second half is where installations go wrong: the device may only serve the fixtures below the line. Fitting one valve on the main house drain so that everything is protected is the cheap way to do it and does not comply here.

This is an open-ended cost attached to a project about something else. You are pricing an extension; the condition prices a camera, and then prices whatever the camera finds in a pipe you have never seen - and in Pasadena that pipe runs under the street, because the house sewer is the owner's all the way to the main. The City's list of defects is long and includes "excessive tuberculation", "excessive root intrusion", "offset pipe joints", "cracked pipes" and a "damaged or cracked connection to the sewer main", plus anything else the City Engineer determines. The remedy is the City Engineer's to approve and "may include partial or total replacement of the house sewer, or installation of a structural or non-structural pipe liner" - and a replacement runs into the City's whole-segment rule, so a partial repair between the curb and the main becomes a full one. The applicant pays for the survey and for the correction.

Two surprises, and both are about scope rather than paperwork. The first is that relining does not get you out of the permit - the pipe being lined is in the City's street even when the machine stays on your driveway, and the sheet says so in terms. The second is bigger: Pasadena does not allow a partial replacement inside a segment. A cracked joint a few feet inside the curb obliges the whole run from the curb to the main, rebuilt to new-work standards. That turns a spot-repair quotation into a different job, and it is the kind of thing an owner finds out with the ground already open. Even a liner can escalate: top hats must lie flush with the sewer main wall, and "any protrusions noted on the post-lining videos will require the Permittee to excavate and remove the protrusions under a separate permit".