Kalamazoo, MI Water Use Rules: Leak Reporting Duty (2026)

Kalamazoo's Water Division, part of the Public Services Department, holds exclusive authority under City Code § 38-14 over anyone who taps, changes, removes, disconnects, repairs, installs, breaks, seals or turns on a water main, branch pipe, service connection, meter, valve or fitting connected to the City's distribution system: only Water Division employees or a City-approved contractor may do that work. To become an approved contractor, § 38-14B requires a plumber licensed and in good standing with the State of Michigan who can demonstrate sufficient experience to the Public Services Director or the Director's designee, who keeps the list of approved contractors and who must issue written permission before any work begins.

That licensing-and-permission structure governs who is legally allowed to diagnose and repair an underground leak in the first place; a property owner cannot simply hire an unlicensed handyman to cut into a City main or service line. Once a leak has caused a documented loss of water through a customer's meter, § 38-40, Water leak adjustment policy, allows the Director of Public Utilities to apply a bill adjustment for that lost water, but only under specific circumstances and only in accordance with a leak adjustment policy that the City Commission adopts and may amend from time to time by resolution; the code does not fix the adjustment amount itself, since that detail lives in the resolution the Commission adopts separately.

Customers pursuing a leak adjustment should expect the Division to verify that the loss actually traces to an underground line leak, since the ordinance ties eligibility to that specific cause rather than to general high usage.