LA County Sewer Inspection & Repair Contractor

"The county" means three different sewer owners in Los Angeles, and each one buys work its own way. We run CCTV inspection and sewer repair, with our own jetter on the truck, for LA County Public Works, for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, for the cities that run their own lines, and for the primes who hold their on-call contracts. We work out of Northridge, CSLB #720343.

County and agency work

Cones and tape go up first, and the site is fenced before the crew leaves.

The three "county" sewer owners

LA County Public Works: the Consolidated Sewer Maintenance District

Public Works runs the Consolidated Sewer Maintenance District, known as the CSMD. It maintains more than 4,600 miles of local sewer and 153 pump stations serving over 2 million people, in unincorporated county areas and in 37 cities that hand their sewer maintenance to the county. The CSMD also runs four small treatment plants, in the Malibu area and at Lake Hughes. Public Works has its own condition assessment program and publishes the defect grade descriptions it uses, so video you hand the county needs to match that grading.

The Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts

The Sanitation Districts are a separate agency, and people mix them up with Public Works all the time. They are 24 independent special districts formed under the County Sanitation District Act of 1923, run jointly from headquarters near Whittier. Together they own about 1,400 miles of trunk sewer and 11 treatment plants, and they serve about 5.6 million people in 78 cities. The Districts own the big trunks. The local pipe in your street usually belongs to the city or to the CSMD.

North of the Valley, the Santa Clarita Valley Sanitation District runs the Saugus and Valencia water reclamation plants. The district spent years fighting chloride in the Santa Clara River, and self-regenerating water softeners were banned in the Santa Clarita Valley as part of that fight.

Cities with their own sewer systems

Some cities run their own collection lines and buy their own sewer work. The City of Los Angeles is the largest, with more than 6,700 miles. Burbank and Glendale are close to our yard. Glendale shares the Los Angeles-Glendale plant on the river by Griffith Park.

Before you send a scope, check which of the three owns the pipe. The owner decides who writes the spec, what grading standard the video must meet, and which system the bid goes through.

What we do for county agencies

• CCTV condition assessment of mains, manhole to manhole, with an Envirosight ROVVER X crawler. Defects logged with footage and clock position, and segments graded 1 to 5 for structure and for flow. Detail on the CCTV inspection page.
• Lateral and connection video to settle whether a problem is in the public main or in the owner's lateral. The CSMD says laterals belong entirely to the property owner, so this question comes up on almost every county backup call.
• Jetting and root cutting, before inspection or as scheduled maintenance.
• Spot repair, lateral replacement, lining and bursting on county property and in the right of way. See public works sewer repair.
• Emergency response at county facilities: parks, libraries, fire stations, yards, clinics.

We do not bid pump station mechanical work, treatment plant work, water mains, fixtures or gas piping.

How county work is bought

Almost no stand-alone small sewer bids come out of the county. The work is mostly task orders off as-needed contracts that a prime already holds. A county sewer or CCTV program often runs $1 million or more over several years, and it gets done in small pieces.

• Public Works posts its construction solicitations on its contracts site with a planholder list for each one, split into primes, subs and plan rooms. Primes use that list to find subs. Bids for many projects go in electronically.
• The Sanitation Districts keep their own vendor list and post their own bids, separate from Public Works.
• Small business preference. The county gives certified Local Small Business Enterprises a bid preference. Under state law it is limited to 7% on construction contracts. On goods and services it is 15%, capped at $150,000. Ask us where our certifications stand for your specific bid.

If you are a prime on the planholder list and your licence does not cover the sewer scope, that is the case we are built for. See for prime contractors.

Distance from our yard

We work across the whole county, but the Valley side is where we are fastest. From Yolanda Avenue in Northridge, the 5 gets us to Santa Clarita in about 25 minutes outside rush hour, and the 101 and the 405 cover Calabasas, Agoura Hills, the Westside and downtown. For far southern or eastern county sites, tell us the address and we give you an honest mobilization time instead of a guess.

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