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Who owns the water service line in Santa Monica, CA

Which part of the pipe is yours

your buildingproperty linesidewalkstreetmain?
The thick length is yours. A hatched run means nobody has said where it divides.

If something’s wrong

Who to call first about the water service line

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

The documents this answer is built on

Who is responsible for which part

Santa Monica owns every water service and meter, pays to maintain, repair and renew them against normal wear, and sets the meters in the public right-of-way. Section 7.12.140(c) provides that "All services and meters shall be owned by the Utilities Division. The expense of maintenance repair and renewal due to normal wear and tear shall be borne by the Utilities Division". This is Santa Monica's own statement.

Santa Monica
The services and the meters, owned by the City's Utilities Division, which bears their maintenance, repair and renewal for normal wear and tear; expenses caused by "any act or omission on the part of the customer" are charged to the customer. The code provides that "Water meters shall be located in the public right-of-way", and only the Utilities Division may "operate the shutoff valve at meters".
The property owner
The code assigns the City the services and meters and does not say in terms who repairs the pipe beyond the meter. What it puts on the consumer is an emergency shutoff "inside of property lines", water lost "through failure to keep plumbing in repair", and, where the City moves a meter, the costs "associated with the consumer's connection to the relocated meters".

What else is worth knowing

The City's side is its services and meters, and the City's water pages say the meter "is generally located in the parkway, near the curb in front of your home or in the alley to the rear of your home". Neither the code nor those pages say who repairs the pipe between the meter and the building, so ask the City's Water Resources Division before paying for work on that run. The same pages warn that "Any damage to the City valve, water meter or service will be billed to the account holder." The State's register puts the City's system over nearly all of Santa Monica's land, but check the name on your water bill.

Sources

Santa Monica Municipal Code section 7.12.140, Service connections and meters

Also quoted:

Checked

What Santa Monica 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.

Santa Monica 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
18,456
Still unclassified
0 (0.00%)
Across California, 9.2% of service lines are unclassified.
Share of service lines still unclassified
  • Santa Monica0.00%
  • 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 99% of Santa Monica's land inside the boundary it maps for the city's own water system. Measured 26 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.
Santa Monica: official site

Your other pipe: the sewer lateral

For the sewer lateral, Santa Monica gives the opposite answer to the one above:

The owner keeps the pipe from the property to the main, and in Santa Monica the code's own term for it names the part in the road: a "house connection sewer" is the pipe "constructed in a street, alley, walk or other public place or in a sewer easement". The City puts it plainly on its permit page - owners are responsible "from their property to the City's sewer main in the City street or alley".

One of the two authorities does not say where its side ends, so the two answers cannot be compared here.

Same trench, separate authorities, decided separately.

Who pays for the sewer lateral in Santa Monica, CA

Look up a specific address

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

Search for an address

How this compares across California