Snow, ice, and a fall: whose duty it is, and the amendment that narrowed the city's immunity

Minnesota gives a municipality an immunity for snow and ice, and most descriptions of it quote a version the legislature replaced in 1986. What survives is narrower than the reputation, and it turns on a single word: affirmatively.

A winter fall in Minnesota produces a claim that has to be sorted into one of two systems before anything else can be said about it. If the ice was on land a private person or business possesses, the ordinary duty of reasonable care applies and the property owner guide sets out what that duty is and the two things that narrow it. If the ice was on a public street or sidewalk, the claim runs into chapter 466, and the analysis is not about duty at all. It is about an immunity, and about a version of that immunity the legislature replaced forty years ago.

The default is liability, and it was set by statute

Minn. Stat. § 466.02 reverses the common-law rule in a single sentence:

Subject to the limitations of sections 466.01 to 466.15, every municipality is subject to liability for its torts and those of its officers, employees and agents acting within the scope of their employment or duties whether arising out of a governmental or proprietary function.

Minn. Stat. § 466.03, subd. 1 then explains how the exceptions operate: “Section 466.02 does not apply to any claim enumerated in this section. As to any such claim every municipality shall be liable only in accordance with the applicable statute and where there is no such statute, every municipality shall be immune from liability.” How that structure works across the whole list, and the 180-day notice period that governs any claim against a public body, are the subject of the government claims guide.

The snow and ice exception, as it reads now

Minn. Stat. § 466.03, subd. 4 is one of the enumerated claims:

(a) Any claim based on snow or ice conditions on any highway or public sidewalk that does not abut a publicly owned building or publicly owned parking lot, except when the condition is affirmatively caused by the negligent acts of the municipality.

(b) Notwithstanding paragraph (a), a municipality that owns or leases a building or parking lot in another municipality is not immune from a claim based on snow or ice conditions on a public sidewalk abutting the building or parking lot, but the other municipality is immune, except when the condition is affirmatively caused by its own negligent acts.

Paragraph (a) contains two carve-outs, not one. The immunity does not extend to a public sidewalk that abuts a publicly owned building or a publicly owned parking lot — the sidewalk in front of a city hall, a public library, or a municipal ramp is outside it by the plain terms. And it does not extend to a condition “affirmatively caused by the negligent acts of the municipality,” whatever the sidewalk abuts.

Paragraph (b) resolves the case that the first carve-out would otherwise leave ambiguous. Where one municipality owns or leases a building or parking lot inside another municipality’s boundaries, the owning municipality loses the immunity for the abutting sidewalk and the host municipality keeps it, subject to its own affirmative-act exception. A county building on a city street is the ordinary example, and the two governments end up in different positions on the same square of concrete.

The version most sources still quote

This is the part worth reading carefully, because the older text is the one that circulates.

Until 1986, Minn. Stat. § 466.03, subd. 4 read: “Any claim based on snow or ice conditions on any highway or other public place, except when the condition is affirmatively caused by the negligent acts of the municipality.” That is the Revisor’s rendering of the pre-amendment text inside the act that changed it. It is also what the Minnesota Court of Appeals was quoting in Robinson v. Hollatz, 374 N.W.2d 300, 303 (Minn. Ct. App. 1985), where the court set the subdivision out from the 1984 statutes and italicised the exception clause.

Laws 1986, ch. 455, § 65 amended the subdivision. In the Revisor’s struck-and-inserted rendering, the words “or other public place” were deleted, and “or public sidewalk that does not abut a publicly-owned building or publicly-owned parking lot” was inserted in their place. Nothing else in the subdivision changed. Section 95 of the same chapter supplied the effective date: “Sections 2, 63 to 77, and 90 are effective July 1, 1986, and apply to claims arising from incidents that occur on or after that date.” The chapter was approved March 25, 1986. Paragraph (b), and the paragraph (a) designation, were added later by Laws 1999, ch. 188, § 1, an act whose own title describes it as “clarifying an exception to tort liability.”

What “affirmatively caused” has been held to mean

Robinson is the case that gives the phrase content, and its facts are the ordinary Minnesota winter ones. A driver making a left turn onto a county road could not see approaching traffic because snow had been plowed into the median “approximately eight or nine feet” high. He was struck, settled with the injured plaintiff, and brought a third-party claim against the county. The trial court held the county immune under both the discretionary-function exception and the snow and ice exception, and granted summary judgment.

The court of appeals reversed. On the snow and ice exception it began where the statute does, at 303: “The statute grants immunity to a county or municipality for injuries resulting from the usual and natural accumulation of snow and ice on the streets.” It then distinguished what had happened:

Here, there was an artificial accumulation of snow in the median due to an "affirmative" act on the part of Dakota County. A municipality should have a duty to remove dangerous obstructions or conditions which it affirmatively created.

The opinion is careful about what that does and does not decide, in the very next paragraph:

Negligence on the part of Dakota County must still be proved. The trier of fact, in determining whether the County was negligent, must take into consideration a myriad of factors presented by Minnesota winters, including the climate, weather conditions, number and availability of county personnel and other circumstances surrounding the accumulation of snow in the median. But these are factual determinations and summary judgment was therefore not proper.

Losing the immunity is the beginning of the claim, not the end of it. The plaintiff still has to prove that what the municipality did was unreasonable in the circumstances, and the court named the circumstances a Minnesota factfinder is entitled to weigh.

Two cautions about relying on Robinson. The subdivision it construed is not the subdivision now in force — its quoted text is the pre-1986 version — although the phrase the case turns on, “affirmatively caused by the negligent acts of the municipality,” survived the amendment untouched. And the opinion’s separate holding on discretionary immunity applies a planning-operational analysis that the Minnesota Supreme Court has developed since; the current treatment of that exception is set out in the government claims guide.

Plowing done by someone the city hired

Minn. Stat. § 160.21 governs road authorities and snow, and it contains a provision that changes who a defendant is. Subdivision 1 permits road authorities, including those of cities, to contract with each other for the removal of snow from highways under their supervision, and to contract with agencies and political subdivisions. Subdivision 2 permits a county or town road authority to remove snow from private property “upon payment of not less than the cost thereof” where doing so “does not unduly delay or interfere with the removal of snow from public highways under its jurisdiction.”

Subdivision 5 is one sentence:

All persons while engaged in snow removal or other work as provided in this section shall be deemed for all purposes the employees of the road authority hiring them.

The phrase “for all purposes” is doing a great deal there. Where the provision applies, the person operating the plow is the road authority’s employee, and § 466.02 makes a municipality liable for the torts of its employees acting within the scope of their duties — which also means the claim carries the immunities, the caps, and the notice period that come with chapter 466.

A separate immunity appears at § 160.21, subd. 6(d), for roads plowed under the uncompleted-subdivision provision: the road authority and its officers and employees “are exempt from liability for any tort claim for injury to person or property arising from plowing, maintaining, or otherwise working on the road and from traveling on the road and related to its maintenance or condition.” That paragraph closes with its own limit — “This paragraph does not apply to a claim for injury that is affirmatively caused by a negligent act of the road authority or its officers and employees” — using the same operative word as § 466.03, subd. 4.

The abutting owner, and what the shovelling ordinance is actually for

Almost every Minnesota city requires the owner or occupant of property abutting a public sidewalk to clear it within some number of hours. The statute that stands behind those ordinances is a cost-recovery provision. Minn. Stat. § 429.101, subd. 1(a) allows a municipality to collect unpaid special charges “as a special assessment against the property benefited for all or any part of the cost of,” among ten other things, “(1) snow, ice, or rubbish removal from sidewalks.”

What that section does is let the city do the work and put the bill on the tax rolls. It does not address liability to a person who falls, and it is not in chapter 466 — which is the chapter that governs the municipality’s own tort exposure, and which speaks only about the municipality. A private occupier’s exposure is a question about the ordinary duty of reasonable care described in the property owner guide, applied to land the occupier possesses, and neither § 429.101 nor § 466.03, subd. 4 answers it.

Where the rest of the analysis goes

Once the immunity question is resolved, a snow and ice claim is an ordinary Minnesota injury claim and runs through the ordinary machinery. The duty owed by a private occupier, the known-or-obvious limitation, and the requirement that the occupier have known or had reason to know of the condition are in the property owner guide. A residential landlord’s non-waivable covenants under Minn. Stat. § 504B.161 are in the same guide. The apportionment of fault between a person who walked across ice and the person responsible for it is governed by Minn. Stat. § 604.01 and is set out in the comparative fault guide. And a claim against any public body carries the notice period and the damages caps described in the government claims guide, which close much earlier than the general limitation.

What this page is not

It describes the structure of Minnesota’s municipal snow and ice immunity, the 1986 amendment that narrowed it, what one appellate decision has said about the phrase “affirmatively caused,” and what the sidewalk-clearing statute does. It does not evaluate whether any particular accumulation was natural or artificial, whether any particular sidewalk abuts a publicly owned building, whether a plowing contractor falls inside § 160.21, subd. 5, or whether anyone was negligent. Robinson itself says those are factual determinations, and it reversed a summary judgment for treating them otherwise.