This morning at 10, the Transportation Committee of the City Council will hold a hearing on a number of bills, among which are two that Mayor Bloomberg and his corporation counsel, Michael Cardozo, are pushing for as part of their campaign for tort reform. This campaign could not come at a more crucial time as the city faces a yawning budget gap in the next fiscal year, projected to be in the neighborhood of $6 billion. A report on page one today by our Errol Louis suggests there’s going to be two sides to this story, as the plaintiffs bar seeks to illuminate the mayor’s exaggerations of the nature and impact of the tort law cases he’s been citing. But more generally, tort reform — even modest steps at the City Council level — could save the city tens of millions of dollars a year in perpetuity.

The bills City Hall is proposing would reduce the amount of money the City pays out to plaintiffs who slip-and-fall on the sidewalks. Presently, the city pays out approximately $60 million a year in sidewalk cases. There are about 2,600 new actions filed each year. About 2,600 are settled each year. And there are about 12,000 pending sidewalk cases in backlog at the city’s Law Department. The average payout in all of these cases is over $20,000. It seems people just can’t keep themselves upright — perhaps they swoon — in the presence of a municipal defendant with such deep pockets as New York City.

The first of the two bills would push the liability in sidewalk cases to the owners of adjacent properties. Businesses and multiple residences — but not owners of one, two, or three family homes — would become solely liable for any injuries due to defects in the sidewalks outside of their establishments. These property owners are already responsible for the maintenance of these sidewalks. This bill would merely take the matter the next logical step. Further, under current law an adjacent property owner only becomes liable for injuries if an attempt is made to repair a known defect, quite an incentive for owners to leave bad enough alone.

The second of the two bills being forwarded by the Law Department would raise the bar for what is considered “notice” to the city of an existing sidewalk defect. About 25 years ago the City Council passed a bill stating that the city could be liable for injuries if it received written notice of a particular crack, bump, or other imperfection. Quickly, our state’s industrious New York State Trial Lawyers Association formed the Big Apple Pothole and Sidewalk Corporation, which every year dumps 5,000 maps on the city, filled up with squiggles representing the geographic locations of potential lawsuits — roughly 700,000 squiggles in all. These squiggles build up over time so that even if 2002’s maps don’t show a problem at a certain location, the city can still be nailed for the defect shown on the old map. The bill being pushed would get rid of the map stunt, replacing it with a requirement for individualized notices, possibly a form that needs to be filled out, or a descriptive letter. The idea seems to be that this should keep our trial lawyer friends as busy as beavers and slow them down as they chew through our wallets.

The city estimates that it can save $40 million of the $60 million it currently pays out in slip-and-fall cases every year. The other $20 million is probably intractable, stemming from cases where sidewalks are adjacent to city-owned buildings or one, two, and three family homes. The $10 million the city spends litigating these cases is also expected to go down. The first bill is given legitimacy by a 1996 New York State Court of Appeals ruling in the case of Hausser v. Giunta, in which the court stated that state law does not forbid cities to transfer liability to property owners for sidewalk injuries. The second law is supported by common sense, which is all one needs to see that the city cannot possibly investigate and repair hundreds of thousands of squiggles representing alleged sidewalk defects spotted by bloodthirsty plaintiffs’ attorneys. Before the battle in Albany gets under way over more extensive tort reform, the City Council has an opportunity to get things moving on these two important bills.