Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Liability for COA maintenance operations

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Aug 5, 2024, at 9:41 PM, Gary Hellenga <gary.hellenga [at] gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Our community (Bozeman Cohousing) is interested in managing groundskeeping
> and snow removal tasks in-house, instead of contracting these maintenance
> tasks to outside parties.  But we're wondering how to cover ourselves for
> liability

We have residents who shovel walks and recently bought a small snow blower for 
the sidewalks along the street (we have long ones).

We have a contract with a snow plow company that blows the parking lot IF there 
is more than 3” of snow. Someone wakes up early on a snow  morning — I think 
they start at 5:30 — to decide if we don’t want them to come. Sometimes 3 
inches is a lot of snow and sometimes it is almost melted already.

We have liability insurance that covers any residents doing any kind of work on 
the property.

A caution related to the caution about security passwords, how many times has 
anyone in your community in their whole lives damaged something when removing 
snow? This is a normal activity done successfully by 14 year olds all over the 
country. Yes, sometimes things happen but normal caution is probably all you 
need unless you know you have a resident who is dangerous with a shovel. In 
that case they shouldn’t be allowed to use a shovel no matter how much 
insurance you have.

If you are as fortunate as we are you will find you have people who love 
getting up to shovel snow.

(We did have to have a long talk with a resident who complained that the 
shovellers were making too much noise and shouldn’t be allowed to shovel until 
10:00.)

Sharon