Designing a Public Project? Avoid Future Dangerous Condition Liabilities by Anticipating Changed Conditions
Government Code section 830.6 grants public entities immunity from liability for dangerous conditions on public property if those conditions arise because of improvement projects for which the plan or design was reasonably adopted or approved. A recent opinion by the California Appellate Court's Second District has reaffirmed that this immunity holds even if an improvement project becomes dangerous because of changed conditions -- as long as the public entity can demonstrate that it anticipated the changed conditions, whether or not it modified its plan or design because of the anticipated changed conditions.
The Second District's opinion highlights how important it is for public entities to consider future changed conditions in their planning or design of public works improvements.
The opinion, Alvis v. County of Ventura, held that where a public entity approves a design that contemplates a specific change of physical condition(s) that may affect a public work, the public entity will retain its design immunity if change of condition occurs and causes injury. In Alvis, the evidence showed that the Defendant County's designers had been warned by consultants that soil build-up would occur behind a retaining wall to be constructed by County, but had rejected the need for design changes to improve drainage. The County did not lose its design immunity when the wall failed and caused a landslide because the soil build-up was a changed condition that related directly to the factors the County considered in making its design choices, and the design immunity of Government Code section 830.6 is intended to prevent judicial second-guessing of a public entity's design choices. Read the entire opinion here.
