Amendments to the Minimum Maintenance Standards - Part 6

This week we continue our review of the amendments to the Minimum Maintenance Standards, which came into effect on January 25, 2013.

Part 6:  Sidewalks

The MMS were amended in February 2010 to require annual inspections of sidewalks for surface discontinuities and required treatment of surface discontinuities that exceeded two centimetres.  The standard has been amended to expressly provide that a surface discontinuity is deemed to be in a state of repair if it is less than or equal to two centimetres.  The standard also provides that sidewalks are deemed to be in a state of repair between annual inspections, provided that the municipality does not acquire actual knowledge of a surface discontinuity in excess of two centimetres.  It will be interesting to see the extent to which the constructive knowledge provision is applied in sidewalk cases.