Tallahassee, FL Water Use Rules: Leak Reporting Duty (2026)

Tallahassee Code of General Ordinances § 21-4 addresses meter accessibility citywide and, in subsection (c), assigns maintenance responsibility on private water systems. Where a city-owned meter serves a customer through pipe the customer owns, that customer, not the city, must maintain everything from the meter to the right-of-way line or to the backflow preventer if one is installed. If a leak occurs anywhere on that private-side plumbing, the city does not repair it or absorb the loss: it issues the property owner a 30-day notice to fix the leak.

If the leak is not repaired within that window, the city calculates how much water was lost and adds that estimated usage to the customer's bill at the city's established water rate, rather than continuing to under-bill for water that never reached a working meter reading. 00 fee for each additional site visit needed to read an inaccessible meter beyond one revisit in a 12-month period. Related provisions in the same chapter reinforce the underlying accountability structure: § 21-9 assigns removal of sewer-lateral obstructions to the city water utility unless the obstruction was caused by the property owner's negligence, in which case the cost is charged back to the owner, and § 21-6 makes it a Code violation to tamper with metering equipment in a way that hides a diversion of city water.

Together, these sections put the burden of monitoring for and reporting leaks past the meter squarely on the customer, with a fixed 30-day cure period before the city starts billing for the estimated loss.