Richardson, Collin and Dallas Counties
Drain Cleaning Richardson: The City Will Sell You a Better Sewer Boundary
Most cities publish where their responsibility for a sewer lateral stops and yours begins, and that is the end of the conversation. Richardson publishes something considerably stranger. It publishes a boundary, and then it publishes a way of moving it.
The starting position is blunt. The city states that a resolution passed by the City Council says the customer or property owner will maintain the house lateral between the main and the building. Not to the property line. Not to the kerb. All of it, including the run under the public street.
Then the city explains what went wrong with that arrangement, in its own words: it created problems, because customers contacted a plumber who would cut the street or alley to maintain the line. So the Council decided that for an interim period the Water Utilities Department could, with homeowner authorisation, install a two-way cleanout at or near the property line.
And once that cleanout exists, the city maintains the section of line between the cleanout and the main at no cost to the homeowner, permanently. That is the single most useful fact about drain cleaning richardson households can act on, and almost nobody knows it.
Who Maintains What, Before and After
Every row below is the city’s own published position. The middle row is the one that changes, and it is the only reason the programme exists.
| Section of pipe | Without a city cleanout | With a city-installed cleanout |
|---|---|---|
| The sewer main in the street | City. Crews check it and remove any stoppage in it | Unchanged. Still the city |
| From the property line to the main | Yours, under the Council resolution | The city, at no cost to you, from the cleanout to the main |
| From the building to the cleanout | Yours | Still yours. The city states the responsibility for maintaining the line between the building and cleanout is that of the homeowner or property owner |
| Anything on private property | Yours | Yours. The city states that under no conditions are City staff obligated or responsible to do any work on private property to relieve a stoppage which occurs on private property |
Read the second row twice, because it is doing more work than it looks like. The pipe under the road does not change ownership. What changes is who is obliged to maintain it, and the city takes that obligation on for as long as the cleanout is there. A household that pays once for an installation is buying out of every future dig in the carriageway on that section.
There is a further quiet consequence in the way the city describes the original problem. The reason the programme exists is that private plumbers were cutting streets and alleys. The cleanout is the city’s answer to that, which means it also has an opinion about who should be opening the road, and the answer is not your contractor.
What Actually Happens
The City Publishes Its Own Call Sequence, Step by Step
In case of a stoppage in the sewer lines at a building, where the city is called to check it, the procedure is published rather than left to the crew on the day. There are four steps and the third one is unusual enough to be worth pausing on.
Step one. City staff check the mainline for stoppage and remove any stoppage in the main line. That happens whether or not you have a cleanout, and it is where a meaningful share of household sewer problems actually turn out to live.
Step two. If city staff have previously installed a two-way cleanout at this location, they check the section between the cleanout and the main and remove any stoppage there.
Step three, the discretionary one. If the stoppage is between the cleanout and the building, the crew will attempt to remove it. The city is explicit that there is no obligation on it to do so, and equally explicit that if they succeed there will be no charge.
Step four. If they cannot clear it, the homeowner must contact a plumber, a contractor, or perform the service themselves, and the city assumes no liability.
The Worst Case Is Published Too, and It Involves Having No Access Point at All
The policy contains one paragraph that a household with an older house should read before it needs to, because it describes a situation with no municipal answer in it.
That is the end of the city’s involvement, at the moment when the problem is most acute. There is a softer intermediate step published alongside it: where an installation has been requested and paid for but not yet carried out, city staff will attempt to provide temporary relief by running a tape through an existing cleanout or opening in the line. But that softer step still requires an opening to exist.
So the practical question for any Richardson house of a certain age is not what the city charges. It is whether there is any accessible opening in the line at all, and the time to find that out is on a dry afternoon rather than at the point where a shower is backing up.
The blunt sentence that closes the policy sets the outer boundary for everything above. Under no conditions are City staff obligated or responsible to do any work on private property to relieve a stoppage which occurs on private property. Everything the city does inside your boundary is a courtesy it has reserved the right to withdraw.
The Number That Is Not There
The Fee Must Be Paid in Advance, and Richardson Does Not Publish What It Is
The city is precise about the timing and silent about the amount. The established fee must be paid in advance before the City will perform any work. That is the whole of it. The figure appears neither on the cleanout policy page nor on the published water, sewer, solid waste, drainage and deposit fee schedule.
We are not going to estimate it. A number invented for a web page about a municipal charge is worse than no number, because somebody will budget against it. Ask Water Customer Service for the current figure and the authorisation form before deciding anything.
The contrast with other cities on this site is instructive rather than critical. Santa Clara publishes a full schedule of cleanout installation charges and a video inspection fee, so a household there can do the arithmetic at the kitchen table, and our Santa Clara plumber page sets those out. Riverside makes city ownership of the lower lateral conditional on a cleanout already existing, which our Riverside plumber page covers.
Richardson is the only one of the three where the city will install the thing for you and the boundary moves as a result. That is a better offer than either of the others. It is simply sold without a price on the label.
What It Plugs Into
525 Miles of Collection Main, and 1,825 Cleanouts That Are Not Yours
The city publishes an inventory of the sewer system its crews maintain, and reading it as a plumbing document rather than an engineering one explains what a crew can and cannot do when it arrives.
The collection system
Approximately 525 miles of collection mains, ranging from 4 to 36 inches, with over 3,900 manholes. Five lift stations, all remotely monitored by the city’s SCADA system.
1,825 main line clean-outs
These are the city’s own access points on its own mains. They are not the two-way cleanouts at property lines, and confusing the two is the commonest misreading of this inventory.
What the crews do
The city lists routine and emergency cleaning, line stoppage removals, sewer taps, manhole construction and clean-out installation. Emergency cleaning is named as standing work rather than an exception.
The last line of that list matters for anyone weighing up an installation. Clean-out installation is not a contract the city lets out. It is a thing its own crews do, listed alongside their routine maintenance, which is why the offer can be extended at all.
The city also runs a Construction Rehabilitation function that conducts closed-circuit television inspection of all underground water, wastewater and storm sewer mains, and states that the information collected leads to repair or replacement of critical infrastructure. The city cameras its own side of the boundary as a matter of course. You pay to camera yours, which is a reasonable division and worth knowing before a survey is quoted.
The Other Drain
The Grate in the Kerb Is Not Connected to Your House, and the City Marks It
Richardson takes part in a regional effort across more than thirty Metroplex communities to fix a round plastic marker beside storm drain inlets on residential streets. The marker reads: this drain for rain, flows to creek, do not dump.
The reason for the campaign is a sentence the city puts plainly. Unlike our home’s sanitary sewers, the storm drains discharge directly to the city waterways, without treatment. Two pipe systems run under the same road and only one of them goes anywhere near a treatment plant.
The storm system is substantial in its own right. The city describes nearly 300 miles of drainage pipes and over 44 miles of creeks across 12 drainage basins, funded by a drainage fee that is a flat 6.25 dollars a month per household and, for commercial property, 0.175 dollars per 100 square feet of impervious area. Churches and school districts are exempt, and state property including the University of Texas at Dallas is exempt under state statute.
Two practical consequences. Water standing over a grate in your street is a drainage matter rather than a sewer one. And anything a contractor rinses toward that grate is going into a creek, which is why a competent firm carries its washings away rather than sending them to the nearest opening.
The Same Fitting, a Completely Different Rule, Half a Mile Away
Richardson is bounded on every side by separate incorporated cities, several of which buy the same wholesale water. The two-way cleanout does not travel with the water.
Garland, immediately east, also requires a two way cleanout close to the house, but as a condition inside its own sewer repair permit, imposed on the plumber doing the work rather than offered by the city as a service. Same fitting, opposite direction of travel: in Garland it is something you must install to satisfy the city, and in Richardson it is something the city installs to relieve you. Our Garland plumber page covers that permit and its conditions in full.
Because Richardson straddles a county line and is ringed by other municipalities, a mailing address is not proof of which city issues the rules for a given property. Anyone booking drain cleaning richardson work on an edge street is worth checking the jurisdiction for first, and the reasons for that sit on the Richardson plumber page.
One further local fact, mentioned once because the mechanism behind it is covered elsewhere on this site rather than here. The city runs a seasonal cooking oil and grease drop-off at the Municipal Service Center on Columbia Drive, free, in two windows either side of the year end, and partners with a Texas company that recycles the collected material into biofuels. It is a container in a car park and it exists because of what the alternative does to the collection system described above.
Drain Cleaning Questions in Richardson, Answered Straight
The Council resolution, the cleanout that moves the boundary, the fee the city does not publish and the case where nobody can help you.
You do, and further out than most people expect. The city states that a resolution passed by the City Council says the customer or property owner will maintain the house lateral between the main and the building. That wording puts the whole run on the owner, including the length under the street, unless a city two-way cleanout has been installed.
It is an access point the Water Utilities Department will install, with homeowner authorisation, at or near the property line. Once it exists the city maintains the section of line between the cleanout and the main at no cost to the homeowner. You are buying a permanent transfer of maintenance responsibility for the hardest section of pipe to reach.
The city does not publish the amount. Its policy says only that the established fee must be paid in advance before the City will perform any work, and the figure does not appear on the published fee and rate schedule either. Contact Water Customer Service for the current fee and the authorisation form. We are not going to guess at it.
It may, and it is careful to say it does not have to. The published procedure is that if the stoppage is between the cleanout and the building the crew will attempt to remove it, that there is no obligation on the city to do so, and that if they succeed there is no charge. If they cannot, you must arrange a plumber or contractor and the city assumes no liability.
This is the case worth planning around. The city states that if no cleanout exists and there is no opening in the line, the occupant will be advised that city staff cannot remove the stoppage and must make their own arrangements. Where an installation has been paid for but not yet done, staff will attempt temporary relief by running a tape through an existing cleanout or opening, which still requires an opening to exist.
With the city, on the evidence of its own procedure. Its crews check the mainline first and remove any stoppage in it before anything else happens, and that step is free. A private call placed first can end up paying to diagnose a blockage that was never on your side of the boundary in the first place.
They are the city’s own access points on its own collection mains, listed alongside approximately 525 miles of collection main, over 3,900 manholes and five SCADA-monitored lift stations. They are not the two-way cleanouts installed at property lines under the homeowner programme, and the two are easy to conflate when reading the inventory.
No, and the city marks them to make the point. It states that unlike our home’s sanitary sewers, the storm drains discharge directly to the city waterways without treatment, and it fixes markers beside the inlets reading this drain for rain, flows to creek, do not dump. The storm system is separately funded through a monthly drainage fee.
Drain Cleaning in Richardson
Find out whether the property has an accessible opening in the line before you need one. Then the question of whose pipe the blockage is in has an answer that does not cost anything to establish. We cover Richardson and the surrounding Collin and Dallas County communities.
How this page was built
Read from published City of Richardson material at cor.net: the two-way cleanout installation policy (the Council resolution, the cut-street problem, the homeowner authorisation, the fee in advance, the no-cost maintenance from cleanout to main, the four-step procedure, the temporary tape relief, the no-opening case and the private property limit), the utility operations FAQ (the city being responsible for the main sewer line and for cleanout to main), the field operations page (the collection system inventory, the lift stations, the crew work list and the closed-circuit television inspection), the storm drain marking page, the drainage utility system page and the published fees and rates schedule.
Deliberately not covered because other pages own them. The moving-clay explanation for a line that loses its fall, the build-decade materials sequence and the permit door belong to the Richardson plumber page. The signs of a failing drain and the choice between cabling and hydro jetting belong to national drain cleaning, and a structural failure rather than a blockage belongs to sewer line repair. Fats, oils and grease as a mechanism is covered to exhaustion elsewhere on this site and is deliberately not re-explained here. Household first steps sit in our guide to unclogging a drain without chemicals.
For the wider region see our Texas service areas, or get in touch.
No office, address, crew or response time of ours is stated for Richardson, and we are not claiming to be based in this city.
Everything above was read from published city material at the time of writing. The city describes the cleanout arrangement as an interim measure, fees and policies change, and no figure for the installation fee is stated here because the city does not publish one. Confirm anything you intend to rely on with the City of Richardson directly.