Pittsfield plows and contractors have made quick work of clearing 2 feet — or more — of snow from the public roadways. The next battlefront for the big dig out: parking lots and driveways.
For homeowners there’s no avoiding the task at hand. If you want to make it to work, day care or the grocery store you’re going to have to dig your car out yourself. But for landlords and tenants contemplating the snowpack in rental parking lots there’s a question: Who’s responsible for clearing out driveways and parking lots at rental properties?
The Eagle reached out to city officials and housing experts to find the answer.
What does Pittsfield’s city code say?
On this issue, nothing.
Andy Cambi, the city’s Health Department director, has his winters busy helping to coordinate the department’s response to snow clearing of city sidewalks. Under Pittsfield city code, property owners — not tenants — must clear their sidewalks of snow and ice within 24 hours after the end of a snow event.
If property owners don’t clear their sidewalks, they risk the potential of receiving a nuisance fine from Cambi’s department for violating city code. But Cambi said there’s no such rule when it comes to driveways or parking lots.
Cambi wrote in an email to the Eagle that the issue “is usually addressed in a lease of who would be responsible.”
What does the state say?
The Massachusetts Sanitary Code is the standard when it comes to many aspects of the landlord-tenant relationship.
Both Cambi and Brad Gordon, the executive director of the Berkshire County Regional Housing Authority, said that the code lays out several landlord responsibilities for clearing snow.
Landlords are required to maintain the safe condition of “means of egress.” That means keeping features like “exterior stairways, fire escapes, egress balconies and bridges free of snow and ice.”
Gordon pointed out that parking lots are not typically means of egress. He wrote in an email to the Eagle that in instances where the sanitary code doesn’t specify a responsibility, snow removal obligations are best set out in a lease agreement so that both the landlord and tenant are on the same page about who does what.
What happens when there’s a disagreement?
Landlords and tenants that find themselves icing each other out, waiting for the other party to pick up the snow shovel, may find some resolution with the Berkshire County Regional Housing Authority’s Dispute Resolution Center.
Gordon said the center has mediated a number of these kinds of issues over the years. When these cases come up, Gordon said landlords are often informed of the potential liability they might face if someone injures themselves on a rental property because of a lack of snow and ice removal.
Even if a lease states that parking lot snow removal is assigned to the tenant “there is still the potential for liability by the property owner to an injured party,” Gordon wrote.
Gordon, as well as countless blogs on Massachusetts insurance and personal injury law, point to a 2010 Supreme Judicial Court decision to prove this point.
In 2005, an elderly Peabody man slipped on a patch of ice in a Target parking lot in Danvers. The man fell, broke his hip and sued Target and the contractor they had hired to clear the snow from the parking lot.
The case made its way to the state’s highest court where a judge ruled that “a property owner owes a duty to all lawful visitors to use reasonable care to maintain its property in a reasonably safe condition in view of all the circumstances.”
The ruling overturned a standard known as the “Massachusetts Rule” which protected landlords from being found liable for any injuries on their property related to “natural” accumulations of snow and ice. Under this standard, landlords only had to be concerned about their liability if an injury occurred from an “unnatural accumulation” of snow and ice — piles created specifically by the landlord.
Gordon said the result of the case is that “slip and fall cases [are] much easier to win than they had previously been.”
“There is no real legal mandate for landlords to remove snow from their parking lots, unless it is part of an egress or part of a tenancy agreement,” Gordon added, “but the legal exposure should motivate landlords to remove the snow even without a legal mandate.”