Who owns the water service line in Riverside, CA
The customer's water service line begins at the back of Riverside Public Utilities' meter and runs to the building, and maintaining it is the customer's job. Everything from the main up to and including the meter is the utility's. If you replace your service line, RPU expects you to tell them. This is Riverside's own statement.
Which part of the pipe is yours
Yours from the meter to your building
Why, and what to doYours from your property line to your building — if certain conditions are met
Why, and what to do
Where the responsibility divides
- Riverside
- The run from the main up to and through the meter union, owned as well as maintained, and the utility says so itself. Water Rule 11, the utility's own filed rule on water service connections, provides that "the Water Utility shall own and maintain all Water Service Connections up to and through the rear water meter union whether located on private property or in the public right-of-way" - so a meter set back inside your garden does not make the pipe running to it yours. The same rule adds a replacement duty most utilities never put in writing: "Water service laterals which are or become defective without fault on the part of the Customer shall be replaced at the Water Utility expense."
- The property owner
- The service line from the back of the meter to the building. "These privately-owned service lines consist of the portion of the service line running from the back of the Riverside Public Utilities' water meter to the customer's home or business. This portion of the water line resides within the customer's property and is the customer's responsibility to maintain." Water Rule 11 puts the customer's side in the same terms: the customer "shall, at his own expense and risk, furnish, install and maintain all apparatus and appliances" needed to receive and use the water past that point.
- What else is worth knowing
- The back of the meter is the line, and two things follow that a reader would not guess. If you replace your service line, tell RPU - "it is the customer's responsibility to notify Riverside Public Utilities if their service line is replaced", because the utility maintains a public map of service line materials and an unreported replacement keeps its old classification. And if your home was built before 1986, your private line is the part worth checking: RPU says its own inventory "found no lead" and that it has "no known lead service lines", while older homes "may have a privately-owned lead line". The utility knows its own pipes; the uncertainty is on your side of the meter.
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, Riverside says:
Riverside is the one city here that divides the lateral by the kind of building rather than by where the pipe runs. For a house, the City maintains the run from the property line to the main. For "nonresidential premises" - which its code defines to include apartments, condominiums and boarding houses - the owner's pipe runs all the way to the connection. Everyone must install and pay for a cleanout at the property line.
Your sewer lateral is yours to the property line; your water line stops being yours at the meter.
Who pays for the sewer lateral in Riverside, 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.