The Joint People Mistake for the Boundary Is the Joint Between Two Contractors

Pima County Regional Wastewater Reclamation published an explanation of house connection sewers in September 2016, addressed to wastewater stakeholders and served jurisdictions. It is not a marketing document and it is unusually candid.

It starts by naming the problem. For most services there is a specific point where ownership becomes private. A water line becomes private on the house side of the meter, which sits at the property line. There is often confusion about the sewer service line because it has no meter to differentiate ownership.

Then it sets out how the pipe actually gets built in a subdivision, in two separate phases. In the site infrastructure phase the sewer contractor installs the public collection sewer, typically eight inch pipe under the road, and while doing so also installs private stub-outs running from that collection sewer to each property line, so the houses will have something to connect to. This happens before the roads are paved and before the kerbs and footways go in.

The house construction phase comes later. The building contractor excavates and exposes the end of the stub-out that the sewer contractor left, and from that exposed pipe end installs the balance of the private pipe into the property, where it is connected to the house plumbing.

And here is the sentence that changes how a Tucson blockage should be thought about. The county states that this point of connection between the two private sewer pipes is often incorrectly assumed to be the separation between public sewer and private sewer.

It is not. Both sides of it are private. What it actually marks is a change of contractor and a gap of months or years, which is a perfectly good place for a joint to be imperfect, for bedding to differ, and for two crews to have had different ideas about fall.

The inspection position is stated just as plainly. Because stub-outs are typically connected to the collection sewer as it is built, when the sewer contractor tests the collection sewer for water tightness the stub-outs existing at that time are plugged and form part of that test. The county then says the inspector does not specifically inspect or otherwise approve the stub-outs. County staff inspect the installation and witness the testing of the public collection sewers. The private stub is along for the ride.

Who Built Which Foot of It, and Who Was Watching

Six facts about the provenance of a Tucson private sewer, in the order they happened. Every one of them is published by the county and none of them is visible from the fixture.

Being in the Right of Way Is a Licence, Not a Handover

The wording the county uses about the buried portion is precise and worth quoting rather than paraphrasing. Location in the right of way does not include any ownership interest beyond a limited licence to install and maintain the connection, and right of way permits are required to conduct maintenance or repair activities there.

Three practical things follow, and none of them is obvious from a slow drain.

First, the length of pipe most likely to be damaged by traffic loading, by utility work, by root pressure from a street tree and by ground movement is the length nobody will maintain for you. Second, the work most likely to need excavation is the work that also needs a permission to be in the road. Third, because the whole run is private, the useful question at the start of a job is not who owns this but which contractor built the section that failed and when.

That last question is answerable more often than people expect, because the county holds connection records and publishes routes to search them. Those records and the field test that confirms them are set out on our main Tucson page and are not repeated here. What this page adds is the reason those records matter more in this metropolitan area than in most: the pipe they describe was assembled from two jobs and only one of them was inspected on its own account.

The county is also candid about the records themselves, which is a rare thing for a public body to publish. Its data comes from a number of different sources, many records are very old, others have come to it second or third hand, and some inherited records are incomplete or inaccurate. That is not a reason to skip the search. It is a reason to treat the search result as a hypothesis rather than a survey.

Why Provenance Is a Diagnostic Question and Not a Historical One

A blockage tells you very little on its own. Water backs up at the lowest fixture whether the cause is a paper obstruction two feet away or a bellied section forty feet out under the kerb. The difference between those two is the difference between a twenty minute visit and a permitted excavation, and provenance is one of the cheapest ways to guess which you are looking at before a camera goes in.

Three patterns are worth holding in mind on a Tucson property, and each of them comes straight out of the two-phase construction sequence above.

A recurring blockage that always clears easily and always returns at a similar interval tends to point at a shape problem rather than a material one, which means fall or alignment rather than what went down the drain. A blockage whose distance from the house is consistently reported near the property boundary is worth taking seriously as a joint rather than as a coincidence, because that is where two contractors met. And a house that has never had a problem until street work happened nearby is a house where the licensed but uninspected length under the road has just had a bad month.

None of this replaces looking. It changes what the survey is for. On a run that is private end to end, the useful output of a camera is a distance and a defect type, because those two numbers decide whether the next step is inside your fence, outside your fence, or under a road that requires a permission to open.

Where a line is scaled or greased rather than obstructed, hydro jetting restores the full bore instead of punching a channel through it, and the method itself is covered on that page rather than here. Where the pipe has failed structurally, sewer line repair is the job, and in this metropolitan area it is a private job for its entire length. Our guide to unclogging a drain without chemicals covers what is reasonable to try first, and our national drain cleaning page covers the signs and the choice between cabling and jetting.

Where the Private Half of a Drain Stops, by Utility

This series has now read enough municipal material to say something that no single city publishes: there is no standard answer to where a household drain stops being private. Four examples, and Tucson is the strictest of them.

The full versions of the second, third and fourth rows sit on our Chicago, Sacramento and San Diego pages respectively, and none of them is restated here. The point of the table is the spread, not the detail: four utilities, four positions, and a household in each of them can be given confident and completely wrong advice by somebody who learned the trade in one of the others.

Six Things Worth Establishing on a Tucson Drain Job

Sources, the Keyword Base, and What We Left Out

The ownership definition, the limited licence wording, the two construction phases, the stub-out inspection statement, the acceptance letter and the observation about the joint being mistaken for the boundary all come from the Pima County Regional Wastewater Reclamation explanation of house connection sewers, dated 8 September 2016.

The ownership statement in its shorter public form, the candid description of the records and their provenance, and the 1979 transfer of city connection records to the county come from the county sewer connections page. The system size, the maintenance programmes and the statement that the department does not treat private property or private lines come from its customer portal.

A DELIBERATE BLANK. The comparison table carries a row reading not read for the cost of a county dye test. The county publishes a fee route and we did not open it, and a fee is exactly the kind of number somebody budgets against.

AND A NOTE ON THIS PAGE'S OWN KEYWORD BASE. This is a narrow topic by search volume as well as by subject. Almost two thirds of the demand attached to it sits in a single phrase, and the whole cluster is barely a dozen distinct phrasings. We have written about what the county actually publishes rather than padding a page out to meet a tail that does not exist.

Deliberately not covered because other pages own them. The city and county jurisdiction map, the pre-dig audit, the connection records portal, the dye test as a method, caliche and slab construction all sit on the Tucson city page. The signs of a failing drain and the comparison of cabling against jetting sit on our national drain cleaning page. The standard of care a utility applies to its own mains, and what it does to them that nobody does to a private line, belongs to our Phoenix drain cleaning page, and that page also carries the one municipal pest programme in this series, which is why the equivalent Pima County programme is named nowhere above.

Also left out: the county sewer charge and the winter averaging that sets it. Two pages in this series already explain a city pricing a sewer bill from a winter water reading, and a third account of the same mechanism would add nothing.

Related Tucson pages: emergency plumbing in Tucson. For the wider region see our Arizona service areas, or get in touch.

No office, address, crew or response time of ours is stated for Tucson, and we are not claiming to be based in this city.

Everything above was read from published Pima County material at the time of writing. Ordinances, code references, records practice and permit requirements change. Nothing here is a determination about a specific property or a substitute for asking the Regional Wastewater Reclamation Department directly.