Douglasville, Douglas County, Georgia
Plumber Douglasville: The Rulebook Costs Twenty Five Dollars and Fines a Thousand a Day
This is the eleventh Georgia city on this site and it produced something none of the other ten did. It is not a rate, a code edition or a permit rule. It is a document.
Water, sewer and stormwater here are run by the Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority, and the Authority states that all of its customers are subject to its Rules and Regulations. Its published fee chart then states that for violations of those Rules and Regulations, the Authority reserves the right to charge a penalty of not more than $1,000.00 per day, per violation, until the violation is corrected.
Then the part that makes it worth writing about. The Authority states that a copy of the Rules and Regulations is available for review at its administrative building on Hospital Drive from 7:30 in the morning to 5:30 in the afternoon, Monday through Friday, and that customers may purchase a copy for a $25 fee.
We are not suggesting that is improper. Plenty of utilities charge for printed documents, and plenty of daily penalty provisions are never used. We are pointing out the gap, because nobody else will: the rules that can cost a thousand dollars a day are the one document in this system that you cannot simply read on a phone at the kitchen table.
Everything below was read from City of Douglasville and Water and Sewer Authority published pages and documents. We hold no office, crew or address here and claim none.
The Sewer Charge
Eighty Per Cent, All Year, With No Winter to Worry About
Sewage cannot be metered, so every utility on earth has to guess how much of your water reached the drain. We have now documented six different guesses. Douglasville uses the simplest one and states its reasoning openly.
The Authority says that it acknowledges not all water used is actually returned to the sewer system, and that therefore the sewer usage fee is based on 80 per cent of water used. The fee chart repeats it as a rule of general application: the sewer treatment charge is levied on 80 per cent of water consumption for all meter sizes.
That is a flat twenty per cent discount, applied to every household, every month, forever, with no application, no second meter and no seasonal deadline. Compared with the cities that set a sewer charge from winter meter reads, it is far simpler and considerably fairer to anyone whose life does not fit a seasonal pattern.
Now the number that makes it sting, and it is the reason this city is worth pairing with another one we built this week. The sewer treatment charge is $10.90 per 1,000 gallons in the first tier and $12.70 in the second and third. The water itself is $6.05 per 1,000 gallons in the first tier.
Sewer here costs roughly one and four fifths times what the water costs. In Calumet City, built in the same week, sewer costs about seven and a half per cent of what the water costs. That is not a pricing quirk, it is a make or buy tell: Calumet City hands its sewage to a regional district and pays a conveyance charge, and Douglasville treats its own and pays for a plant. When you see a sewer line that dwarfs the water line, you are looking at a utility that owns the works.
Who You Are Actually Dealing With
Not the City, Not the County, and It Says So in Writing
Across this project we have catalogued a lot of ways a utility can relate to the government whose name it carries. Douglasville has produced a new one, and the verb is the point.
The Authority was created as an independent agency by the Georgia Legislature in 1985 by the purchase of the water and sanitary sewer services from both the City of Douglasville and the County. It did not get transferred them or spun out holding them. It bought them.
The City is unusually direct about the consequence, stating that as such the Authority is not part of the City or County governments and, therefore, is not supported by tax dollars, and that its operating funds come from customer payments for drinking water, wastewater removal and stormwater management services.
The governance keeps both sellers in the room. Policies are set by a board of seven: five local residents appointed alternately by the City Council and Mayor and by the County Board of Commissioners and its Chairman, on five year staggered terms, with the Mayor and the Commission Chairman both serving as ex officio voting members. The board appoints an Executive Director who serves by contract.
The Fee Chart
The Hundred Dollar Question: Is This the Authority’s Problem or Yours?
Buried in the fee chart is a charge that changes how a household should think about a suspected leak, and almost nobody reads far enough down to find it.
The Authority publishes a fee of $100.00 for an unnecessary trip to the site, with the chart stating in brackets that unnecessary is as determined by the Authority. A separate, much smaller charge of $25.00 covers an ordinary trip fee or a re-read request.
The logic is perfectly reasonable from the Authority’s side. The consequence for a household is that calling the utility about a problem that turns out to be on your side of the meter is not free, and you do not get to decide which side it was on.
- Turn everything off inside, then watch the meter. If it still moves, the loss is between the meter and the house, which is your pipe and your bill.
- Wet ground, a warm patch on a slab, or a sudden pressure change without a corresponding meter movement point in different directions and are worth noting before you ring anybody.
- If the meter itself is not moving and the bill is still high, that is a re-read request at $25.00, not an emergency callout. Our leak detection page covers the private side properly.
- If water is visibly surfacing in the street or at the meter box, that is the Authority’s and there is no argument to have.
The rest of the schedule rewards planning. Restoring a delinquent account is $50.00, but after hours or same day restoration is $100.00, so the difference between sorting it on a Tuesday afternoon and sorting it on a Tuesday evening is fifty dollars. Same day service initiation is $50.00 where a normal start is not, which is a real cost of moving in without notice. The late payment penalty is 15 per cent of unpaid current past due charges, which is high enough that a missed bill is worth chasing.
Meter tampering escalates deliberately: $100.00 for a first offence, $500.00 for a second and $1,000.00 for a third. Damage to a meter box, lid or endpoint caused by a customer runs from $125.00 to $500.00. Both are worth mentioning to anyone doing groundwork on your property, because a contractor’s excavator does not know where the Authority’s property begins and the charge lands on the account holder.
The Rate Ladder
Your Tier Boundaries Depend on Your Meter, Not on Your Household
Water is priced on a three step inclining block: $6.05 per 1,000 gallons in the first tier, $7.55 in the second and $12.10 in the third. The top tier is exactly double the bottom one, which is a steeper penalty than most systems on this site.
The unusual part is where the steps fall. The tier boundaries are not the same for everybody. On a 5/8 inch meter the first tier runs to 5,000 gallons and the third begins above 8,000. On a 1 inch meter the first tier runs to 12,500 and the third begins above 20,000. The boundaries keep scaling all the way up to a 10 inch meter, where the first tier runs to 575,000 gallons.
So the volume at which you start paying double is a function of the pipe the Authority fitted, not of how many people live in the house. Two identical families on different meter sizes hit the punitive tier at different points, and a household that has upsized a meter for a fire sprinkler or a large irrigation system has quietly bought itself a bigger cheap allowance as well.
One more line in the chart deserves attention because it makes the irrigation question a genuine calculation rather than an assumption. The Authority states that water usage on irrigation only meters, for residential and commercial customers, will be billed at the established third tier retail rate.
Read that alongside the sewer rule and the two effects pull against each other. An irrigation only meter escapes the sewer charge entirely, which is 80 per cent of consumption at $10.90 or $12.70 per 1,000 gallons. But the water on it is charged at $12.10 from the very first gallon rather than at $6.05. Add the published components and a thousand gallons through a first tier house meter costs $6.05 of water plus $8.72 of sewer, while the same thousand through an irrigation meter costs $12.10 and no sewer. The second is cheaper, and it gets much cheaper the higher up the tiers your house meter already sits.
Those are the Authority’s published rates added together, not a quotation from it, and base fees and an application fee sit on top. But the shape of the answer is clear enough to be worth pricing properly on any property with substantial outdoor water use, rather than dismissing a second meter as an expense.
Exactly the same design choice turned up in Tallahassee this week, where the commercial irrigation rate is set at precisely the residential top tier. Two utilities in two states, arriving independently at the same idea: outdoor water should be priced as though the household had already used a great deal.
The Permit
The Step That Cannot Be Done Online, in an Online System
The City issues plumbing permits through its Building Division, and the process is published as an ordered set of steps with one thing in the middle that catches people out.
Contractors, engineers, permit expeditors and design professionals must first create a contractor account in the City’s online portal. Then, before anything else can happen, they must telephone the Building Division to obtain a webpin for that account. Only then can they log in and submit the application.
A separate system handles payments and inspection requests, and it needs its own PIN, obtained by contacting Building Inspections on a different number. Two portals, two credentials, two phone numbers, one job.
None of that is unreasonable, and the account is a one off. It is simply not something you want to discover at eight in the morning on the day a water heater has to come out. If a contractor has not worked in Douglasville before, the webpin call is the thing to make sure happened yesterday.
Homeowners get a shorter route, and the City names exactly which permits it is willing to issue to them: heating and cooling equipment installation, water heater replacements, and electrical service reconnects. That is a specific and unusually short list, and one of the three is squarely a plumbing job.
Homeowners do not need a contractor account. The City instructs them to check the box certifying that they are the homeowner at the applicant information step, and adds a detail worth quoting because it prevents a lot of confusion: if the owner information shown is incorrect, still check the box, update the applicant information, and proceed.
The Building Division sits at 6758 Spring Street and publishes hours of Monday to Friday, eight until five, excluding holidays. It lists a Building Official and three building inspectors, one of them part time, which is a useful indication of the size of the team you are scheduling against. It also publishes a monthly report of every building permit issued in the city, which is a genuinely transparent thing to do and a good way to see what work is actually being permitted around you.
For code content, our Marietta page carries the most detailed published inspection standard we have found anywhere in Georgia, including the pressures a rough in has to hold, and our Atlanta and Georgia overview pages cover the wider regional picture.
The Edges
City, County, and the Bill That Covers Both
Douglasville is the seat of Douglas County, west of Atlanta, and the boundary between the two governments matters less here than in most places, for one specific reason: the utility crosses it. The Authority describes itself as the sole water provider for Douglas County, and the same rules, rates and fee chart apply on both sides of the city limit.
Inside the city limit
Water, sewer and stormwater from the Authority, plus a City garbage charge collected on the same bill by the Authority acting as billing agent. Building permits from the City Building Division on Spring Street.
Unincorporated Douglas County
The same Authority, the same rates and the same rulebook, but no City sanitation line and a different permit authority. If someone quotes you a permit process, confirm which government they mean.
On a well, anywhere in the county
Worth naming because it surprises people. The Authority states that all homes and businesses in Douglas County, even the ones on a well, are charged a stormwater fee, published at $4.00 per equivalent residential unit, with non residential properties charged on actual impervious area. A property with no water bill still has an Authority relationship.
A note on the county name
Douglas County, Georgia is not the Douglas County that appears elsewhere on this site. Our Castle Rock page concerns Douglas County, Colorado, an entirely different jurisdiction with different rules. The names are identical and nothing else is.
One more thing about that stormwater fee, because it is the quiet answer to a question people ask constantly. Stormwater is the reason the Authority has a claim on a property that takes no water from it at all, and it is why culverts, basins and ditches are its responsibility rather than the road department’s. If your problem is standing water in a ditch rather than in a pipe, you now know which body to ring.
Douglasville Plumbing Questions, Answered From Published Documents
Everything below was read from City of Douglasville and Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority published pages and fee documents.
As a flat 80 per cent of your metered water. The Authority states that it acknowledges not all water used is actually returned to the sewer system, and that the sewer usage fee is therefore based on 80 per cent of water used, and its fee chart applies that to all meter sizes. There is no winter averaging period, no ceiling and no application. It is the simplest sewer estimate we have documented anywhere.
No, the opposite. In cities that set a sewer charge from winter meter readings there is a protected window and a leak outside it costs you water only. Here there is no window: any month’s consumption is charged sewer at 80 per cent of itself. Every month matters equally, so there is no good time of year to leave a running fixture alone.
Because this utility treats its own wastewater. Water is $6.05 per 1,000 gallons in the first tier, and the sewer treatment charge is $10.90 in the first tier and $12.70 above it. Where a city hands its sewage to a regional district it pays a conveyance charge and the sewer line on the bill is small. Where it runs the plant, the sewer line is the big one.
Neither. The Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority was created as an independent agency by the Georgia Legislature in 1985 by purchasing the water and sanitary sewer services from both the City and the County. The City states plainly that the Authority is not part of either government and is not supported by tax dollars. Its board is seven people: five local residents appointed alternately by the City and the County on five year staggered terms, plus the Mayor and the County Commission Chairman as ex officio voting members.
The fee chart says the Authority reserves the right to charge a penalty of not more than $1,000.00 per day, per violation, for violations of its Rules and Regulations, until the violation is corrected, and the Authority states that all customers are subject to those Rules and Regulations. Worth knowing alongside that: the Rules and Regulations are available for review at the administrative building on Hospital Drive during office hours, and customers may purchase a copy for a $25 fee.
It can. The published fee chart includes $100.00 for an unnecessary trip to the site, with unnecessary defined as determined by the Authority, alongside a $25.00 trip fee or re-read request. So it is worth establishing which side of the meter the problem is on before calling. Turn everything off inside and watch the meter: if it still moves, the loss is on your side.
Possibly the meter. The tier boundaries scale with meter size rather than with household size. On a 5/8 inch meter the top tier starts above 8,000 gallons; on a 1 inch meter it starts above 20,000. The rates themselves are the same, $6.05, $7.55 and $12.10 per 1,000 gallons, but the volume at which you start paying double is set by the pipe rather than by you. The senior rate is the other likely explanation.
There is, and it is substantial. On 5/8 and 3/4 inch meters the senior base fee is $2.50 for water and $2.50 for sewer, against standard base fees of $13.50 and $7.65 on the same meters. That is roughly five dollars a month in fixed charges instead of twenty one, before any water is used. If someone eligible is on the account and it has not been applied, call and ask.
It is a real calculation rather than an obvious yes or no, and the Authority publishes both halves of it. An irrigation only meter escapes the sewer charge entirely, but the Authority states that water on irrigation only meters is billed at the established third tier retail rate, $12.10 per 1,000 gallons, from the first gallon. Adding the published components, a thousand gallons through a first tier house meter is $6.05 of water plus $8.72 of sewer, against $12.10 and no sewer through an irrigation meter. Base fees and an application fee sit on top, so price it properly, but the direction is clear.
If you are a contractor, three things in order: a contractor account created in the City’s online portal, then a webpin obtained by telephoning the Building Division, then the application itself. The middle step cannot be done online. A second system handles payments and inspection requests and needs its own PIN from a different number. Make those calls before the day of the job, not on it.
For a short and specific list, yes. The City names heating and cooling equipment installation, water heater replacements, and electrical service reconnects. No contractor account is needed; you check the box certifying that you are the homeowner at the applicant information step, and the City adds that if the owner information shown is wrong you should still check the box, update the applicant information and proceed.
Stormwater. The Authority states that all homes and businesses in Douglas County, including those on a well, are charged a stormwater fee, published at $4.00 per equivalent residential unit, with non residential properties assessed on their actual impervious area. It funds the construction, maintenance and repair of culverts, basins and ditches, which is also why stormwater problems go to the Authority rather than to a road department.
Sources, and What We Refused to Say
How This Page Was Built
Every rate, fee, rule and date above was read from City of Douglasville and Water and Sewer Authority published pages and documents during this build.
The source disagreement we found
One, and it is small enough to be charming. The City states that operation of the newly created Authority began on 27 December 1985. The Authority’s own history page says it was created in 1985 and, two paragraphs later, that it has been serving Douglas County since 1986. Four days of trading in 1985 is the entire difference, and the two bodies rounded it in opposite directions. Both readings are above.
What we refused to state, and why
We refused everything in the City’s plumbing submittal checklist. The document downloads perfectly and its text is not extractable: it yields eighty three thousand characters of font glyph codes and no readable words at all. A submittal checklist is exactly the sort of thing that must not be guessed at, so nothing from it appears above. Ask the Building Division for it directly.
We refused a hardness figure, because no source read this session publishes one, and every treatment process detail beyond the plant capacities the Authority states itself.
We refused the Authority’s lead and copper and service line inventory material entirely. That is a deliberate editorial decision rather than a gap: three other pages published on this site this week already cover three different positions on the same federal rule, and a fourth in a row would be a habit rather than a finding. If lead is your question, our Calumet City and Tallahassee pages cover it thoroughly from opposite directions.
We refused several subjects that are closed on this site and are covered properly elsewhere, including sewer cleanouts and private laterals, backflow and cross connection devices, and grease handling. The Authority’s fee chart prints a cleanout repair fee and it is not used here.
A note for anyone retracing our steps
Two things are worth passing on. The City site returns a blanket forbidden response to ordinary automated requests on every path, including its robots file; a browser tab reaches all of the same pages without any difficulty, and that is where the City material below was read.
And a warning about the utility’s address. We first guessed the Authority’s domain from its initials, and that guess answered a status check with a success code, returned a small error page as its body, and then failed to connect at all on a retry. Three different answers from one host inside a minute. The real domain has two Ds in it, for Douglasville-Douglas County, and we found it printed in an email address on the City’s own water service page. Do not guess a utility domain from initials, and when a guess behaves oddly, go and find the name written down somewhere.
Start with the City’s water service page, which carries the Authority’s creation, governance and independence, and its Building Division page and plumbing permit application page for the portal steps, the webpin requirement and the homeowner permit list.
For the utility, see the Authority’s about page for the history, the scale figures and the Rules and Regulations arrangement, its rates and fees page for the 80 per cent sewer rule and the fee explanations, its frequently asked questions for the billing and disconnection policies, and its rates and impact fee chart for every figure quoted above, including the tiers, the senior rates, the irrigation meter rule and the penalties.
Elsewhere on this site, our Georgia overview covers statewide licensing and routing, Marietta the most detailed published inspection standard in the state, Atlanta the regional water picture, and Calumet City and Tallahassee the two sewer pricing designs contrasted above. For the work itself, see leak detection, drain cleaning, sewer line repair, water heater repair, burst pipe repair and emergency plumbing, or get in touch.
No office, address, crew or response time of ours is stated for Douglasville. Everything above was read from City of Douglasville and Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority published pages and documents at the time of writing. Rate charts are adopted annually and carry their own effective dates, fee schedules are revised, penalty provisions are discretionary, and the Rules and Regulations referred to throughout were not read by us because they are not published online. Nothing on this page is a quotation of record, a legal opinion, or a substitute for asking the body that holds the pen.