Announcer: This segment is sponsored by Harding Mazzotti.
Reporter: The New York State Court of Appeals delivered a landmark ruling for an injured motorcyclist ruling that an online app to report potholes meets the requirements for providing prior written notice of road defects to local governments and this ruling may have some far-reaching implications for municipalities.
So managing partner, Paul Harding, is here from Harding Mazzotti. So, Paul, thanks for being here with us. It’s been a minute. Yeah. So can you explain what the ruling was here?
Paul: Yeah, so keep in mind that municipalities do not have any liability unless they’ve been given prior written notice about a defect and then fail to clean it up within a reasonable amount of time. So that’s the backdrop of this. So they had a SeeClickFix app and you saw a problem, you took a picture of it, and you send it to the city and said there’s a…and then they would determine is it an issue and they would fix it or not.
Well, here they didn’t like the fact that that served as prior written notice on an injury claim. They denied it. Lower courts denied it, but the highest court in New York, Court of Appeals, said that counts as prior written notice. The city would be on the hook for not repairing the defect.
Reporter: Gotcha. And so how is the city responding now to all this?
Paul: Well, they shut down the app initially, and then they rewrote their rules. They rewrote the laws, and they’re saying that no longer if you call, call us about a defect, but it’s not prior written notice. You can send us an email about it, but it’s not prior written notice. Now it’s got to be written with a wet signature and either hand delivered or mailed to the city before the prior written notice statute. So they took an opportunity here to kind of take a step back and limit their exposure.
Reporter: Gotcha. And so are there any other New York municipalities impacted?
Paul: Yeah, so the Conference of Mayors which represents all the kind of local municipalities, they voiced in on that. They’re watching this super closely and my guess is, is that they’re gonna mirror what the city of Albany did to further insulate themselves from liability.
Reporter: Right. And so then what are the greater impacts for the average citizen?
Paul: Well, you know, I mean, we have our local governments to keep us safe. One of the things they do is keep us safe and in this case, it doesn’t mean that they won’t keep us safe but one of the reasons that they were doing some of the things is they felt, “Uh-oh, we’re on notice. We’ve got to clean up this defect, and then if somebody gets hurt again we’re on the hook.” But now they’re not gonna have that fear so I guess the sense is that there could be a little less of an effort made to clean up some of the potholes, some of the defects that are controlled by the municipality.
Reporter: All right, well we’ll have to just wait and see I guess.
Paul: Yes, we will.
Reporter: All right, Paul, thank you so much for explaining it all.
Paul: Absolutely.
Reporter: And for more info covered in our weekly What Are Your Rights segments or to send us a story idea just head to our website CBS6ALBANY.com.
