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Who owns the water service line in Redondo Beach, 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 Redondo Beach about the water service line.

The documents this answer is built on

Who is responsible for which part

Redondo Beach is claimed by two water utilities and it does not matter which one serves you: California Water Service and Golden State Water Company both file the same CPUC rule, so the service pipe, the curb stop, the meter and the meter box are the utility's, and the piping past the meter is yours. The curb stop, which folklore treats as the boundary, is expressly the utility's under both. This is Redondo Beach's own statement.

Redondo Beach
The service pipe from the main, the curb stop, the meter and the meter box, on both utilities' filed tariffs. California Water Service's Rule 16 states that "the service pipe, curb stop, meter, and meter box furnished by the utility at its own expense and located wholly or partially upon a customer's premises are the property of the utility". Golden State Water Company's Rule 16-B states that "the service pipe, curb stop, meter, and meter box furnished by or on behalf of the utility and located wholly or partially upon a customer's premise are the property of the utility". The difference between those sentences is who paid for the pipe, not where the line falls.
The property owner
The piping from the meter onward, on both tariffs. Each draws the utility's ownership at the service pipe, curb stop, meter and meter box and no further, so the house side of the meter is the customer's. Neither tariff states an affirmative repair duty on either side - they are ownership provisions - so a homeowner facing a leak between the meter and the building is on the customer side of both companies' line.

What else is worth knowing

Which utility serves your address is worth establishing, and not for this question. Both give the same answer about where the pipe stops being theirs, so the ownership line is the same either way. It changes who you ring, what a leak adjustment looks like and what either company will do about replacing a service line, none of which are the same between them - and the City itself has not been established as serving water here at all: California Water Service names Redondo Beach without qualification while Golden State Water Company's 2025 plan claims only portions of it, and which of them is right is not settled here. A second thing worth knowing whichever serves you: if the leak is between the main and the meter, both tariffs make that the utility's property, whatever anyone tells you about the curb stop being the boundary. The State's register, for its part, puts California Water Service's system over a little under half of Redondo Beach's land and the City of Torrance's over about 1%; the rest - about half - is ground inside the city limits that no published water service area reaches - not a rival utility, and not necessarily unserved. That is one more reason the name on your bill, not this page, settles which utility is yours.

Sources

California Water Service Rule 16, the linked document, with Golden State Water Company's Rule 16-B section B.3.a saying the same thing for the part of the city it claims

Also quoted:

Checked

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.
  • 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.
Redondo Beach: official site

Your other pipe: the sewer lateral

For the sewer lateral, Redondo Beach says:

The property owner is responsible for the sewer connection, and the City's own definition puts the expensive part inside it: a "sewer connection" here is a privately maintained line within the public street, including the wye or tee at the main. The City maintains the public sewers and claims no share of the connection.

Your sewer lateral is yours to the main, fitting included; your water line stops being yours at the meter.

Same trench, separate authorities, decided separately.

Who pays for the sewer lateral in Redondo Beach, CA

Look up a specific address

This page describes what applies to properties in Redondo Beach 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