Collapsed Road, Flooded Home: Ohio Supreme Court Reads the Road-Repair Immunity Exception Broadly

Published December 17, 2024 · Ohio Supreme Court

When a county lets a road crumble and someone gets hurt, the county's first response is usually immunity. Ohio law has long made an exception for roads that are not kept in repair. On December 6, 2024, the Supreme Court of Ohio rejected an attempt to shrink that exception, holding that it protects anyone whose person or property is harmed by a negligently maintained public road, not just the people driving on it.

The decision is Schlegel v. Summit Cty., Slip Opinion No. 2024-Ohio-5678. The case involves a flooded basement, not a car crash. But the way the Court read the statute matters for everyone hurt by a dangerous road in Ohio.

A sinkhole, a blocked culvert and a flooded basement

Roberta Schlegel lives at the corner of two roads in Sagamore Hills, in Summit County. According to the Court's opinion, a county engineer's inspection in April 2016 found holes in the culverts under those roads, and the county planned to replace them. Before the work was done, a portion of the road collapsed into a sinkhole. Ms. Schlegel alleged that the debris blocked a drainage culvert, and that during rains on three days in May 2017, water was diverted into her yard and her basement flooded. In nearly 30 years in the home, she said, the basement had never flooded before, and the flooding stopped once the collapsed section was repaired.

She sued the county. The trial court granted summary judgment for the county, and the Ninth District Court of Appeals affirmed. Both courts reasoned that the road-repair exception to immunity applies only to motorists and other road users, and Ms. Schlegel was neither.

How Ohio's immunity statute is built

Cities, counties, townships and other political subdivisions are governed by R.C. Chapter 2744, which works in three steps:

1. General immunity. Under R.C. 2744.02(A)(1), a political subdivision is generally not liable for injury or property loss connected with its functions.
2. Exceptions. R.C. 2744.02(B) lists situations where it is liable anyway. Division (B)(3) provides that political subdivisions are liable for injury, death, or loss to person or property "caused by their negligent failure to keep public roads in repair and other negligent failure to remove obstructions from public roads."
3. Defenses. Even when an exception applies, R.C. 2744.03 lists defenses that can restore immunity.

What the Court decided

Writing for a 4-3 majority, Justice Brunner held that R.C. 2744.02(B)(3) "means exactly what it says." Nothing in the text limits the exception to people using the road. Any person may seek to hold a political subdivision liable for injury or property loss caused by its negligent failure to keep public roads in repair or to remove obstructions from them. Because the statute is plain and unambiguous, the Court said, that ends the analysis. The Court noted that even the Ninth District had acknowledged that the statute's text does not say the loss must occur on the road.

The Court did not decide that the county is liable. It sent the case back to the trial court to decide two remaining questions: whether the road collapse actually blocked the culvert and caused the flooding, and whether any defense in R.C. 2744.03 restores the county's immunity. The county has argued that its decisions about how to use its resources are protected. Those questions remain open.

The dissent

Chief Justice Kennedy, joined by Justices DeWine and Deters, dissented. In the dissent's view, a culvert underneath a road is not part of a "public road" as the statute defines that term, and the flooding was caused by the deteriorated culvert, not by the road itself. The majority did not adopt that reading.

Why this matters for crash victims and others hurt by bad roads

Most road-defect cases we see involve crashes: a pothole that throws a motorcyclist, a sinkhole or washout that swallows a tire, a collapsed edge that sends a car off the road, debris left in a travel lane. Those claims run through the same exception, and Schlegel matters to them in several ways:

• Plain text controls. The Court refused to add limits to the exception that the legislature did not write. That approach favors injured people, because counties and cities often argue for narrow readings of the immunity exceptions.
• People near the road are covered too. A pedestrian on a sidewalk, a homeowner whose property is damaged, or a cyclist hit by a car that swerved around a collapsed lane can all point to the statute's broad language about "injury, death, or loss to person or property."
• The definition of "public roads" still matters. R.C. 2744.01(H) defines public roads as the roads, highways, streets, avenues, alleys and bridges within a political subdivision, but excludes berms, shoulders, rights-of-way and traffic control devices unless the devices are mandated by Ohio's manual of uniform traffic control devices. Where exactly the defect was can decide the case.
• Notice and repair records are key. In Schlegel, the county's own engineer had found holes in the culverts a year before the collapse. Inspection reports, complaint logs and work orders often show that a city or county knew about a hazard and did not fix it.

This is one more decision in a line of cases on government immunity. In 2023, I wrote about the Supreme Court's Greenville schools decision on the building-defect exception. Claims against the State of Ohio itself, such as ODOT on a state highway, follow different rules in the Court of Claims, as I explained in our March post on Smith v. Ohio State. Our page on claims against the government explains both systems.

What this means for you

If a pothole, sinkhole, washout or obstruction on a city, county or township road caused your crash or damaged your property, you may have a claim despite governmental immunity, and you do not have to have been driving on the road to bring it. Act quickly: claims against political subdivisions generally must be filed within two years under R.C. 2744.04(A), and road conditions get repaired, which erases the physical evidence. Our guide chapter on deadlines and the timeline of an Ohio injury case explains the government deadlines, and our car and truck accidents page explains how we investigate crashes.

Photograph the defect before it is fixed, note its exact location, and keep any record of complaints you or your neighbors made about it.