Johnson v. City of Vidalia

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                   SUPREME COURT OF GEORGIA
                   Case No. S25C1294


                                                                              May 5, 2026


        The Honorable Supreme Court met pursuant to adjournment.

The following order was passed:

                AMY WADE JOHNSON v. CITY OF VIDALIA.

      The Supreme Court today denied the petition for certiorari in
this case.

        All the Justices concur.


Court of Appeals Case No. A25A0586
PINSON, Justice, concurring.
       I join the Court’s decision to deny review of this case. I
write separately to flag as problematic one of the Court of Ap-
peals’s alternative bases in support of its conclusion that the City
was entitled to summary judgment on the negligence claim
against it.
       Amy Johnson was running with a friend in the City of Vi-
dalia when she tripped over an uneven part of a sidewalk and fell,
hurting her shoulder and face. She sued the City, claiming that
her injuries were caused by the City’s negligence and mainte-
nance of a nuisance. The City moved for summary judgment on
several bases, but the trial court denied the motion, concluding
that disputed issues of material fact remained for a jury to decide.
The Court of Appeals reversed the trial court, holding that the
City was entitled to summary judgment on both claims against it.
       In support of its holding that the City was entitled to sum-
mary judgment on Johnson’s negligence claim, the Court of Ap-
peals said that it has “never held that a passive failure to main-
tain a sidewalk would be a basis for [municipal] liability,” and
that imposing such liability required “some affirmative action the
city performed in a negligent manner.” City of Vidalia v. Johnson,
375 Ga. App. 601, 604 (2025). On this point, the court was mis-
taken. Cities have long had a duty to keep their streets and side-
walks safe for ordinary travel. See, e.g., City of Atlanta v. Hamp-
ton, 139 Ga. 389, 392 (1913) (“It is very common, in stating the
rule, to say that it is the duty of a municipal corporation to keep
its streets and sidewalks in a reasonably safe condition, so that
persons can pass along them in the ordinary methods of travel in
safety.”). That well-established duty plainly includes addressing
hazards within the boundaries of the sidewalk that render its use
for ordinary travel unsafe. See City of Milton v. Chang, __ Ga. __
(2026), S25G0476, slip op. at 6 (Ga. Mar. 12, 2026); City Council
of Augusta v. Tharpe, 113 Ga. 152, 156 (1901) (“[T]here can be no
doubt, under the rules of law now settled by repeated adjudica-
tions in this and other jurisdictions, that the city authorities must
keep in a reasonably safe condition all parts of its sidewalks
which are intended to be used by the public.”) (citing City of At-
lanta v. Milam, 95 Ga. 135, 137 (1894)). And a city may be held
liable for negligent failure to mitigate such a hazard as long as it
had actual or constructive notice of it, regardless of whether the
city took any “affirmative action” that allowed the hazard to arise.
See OCGA § 32-4-93(a) (municipality is relieved of liability for
“defects” in its streets and sidewalks if the city “has not been neg-
ligent in constructing or maintaining” its roads, or lacked actual
or constructive notice of the defect). 1 See also, e.g., Hampton, 139
Ga. at 390 (city was liable when a pedestrian fell after stepping
on the broken cap of a water meter on a city sidewalk, because
the cap had been broken for at least a week and “the city was
negligent in not discovering and repairing it”); Idlett v. City of At-
lanta, 123 Ga. 821, 825 (1905) (rejecting city’s demurrer on a neg-
ligence claim by a plaintiff who fell in a hole in a sidewalk, where
the hole had existed for about six months and the city “knew of it,
or by the exercise of ordinary care must have ascertained it”); City
of Columbus v. Ogletree, 102 Ga. 293, 295–96 (1897) (city was li-
able when a pedestrian fell into a hole in a sidewalk that had been
“carelessly and negligently left open by the city,” when the city
had notice of the defect); Bellamy v. City of Atlanta, 75 Ga. 167,
169 (1885) (reversing judgment for the city where a pedestrian
fell in a hole in a sidewalk, because “[i]f the city could have ascer-
tained the defect, its failure to do so is negligence on its part”);


       1 This statute applies to “defects in public roads,” OCGA § 32-4-93(a),
and “public roads” include “sidewalks,” OCGA § 32-1-3(24).




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Mayor & Council of Rome v. Dodd, 58 Ga. 238, 239 (1877) (city
was liable when a pedestrian fell through a hole in a bridge across
a ditch, because the hole had been there for six weeks and had
been “negligently and carelessly suffered to remain there” by the
city); City of Milledgeville v. Cooley, 55 Ga. 17, 18 (1875) (city was
liable when a pedestrian fell into a “deep ditch or gully” across a
public city street, which the city had “wil[l]fully allowed to remain
there”); City of Atlanta v. Perdue, 53 Ga. 607, 607–08 (1875) (city
was liable when a pedestrian fell into an excavation in a sidewalk
made by a third party who was putting up a building next to the
sidewalk, because the excavation had been there for “two or three
weeks,” so the city either knew or should have known about it and
had neglected or omitted to repair it); City of Savannah v. Her-
rera, 343 Ga. App. 424, 425–26, 436 (2017) (affirming denial of
summary judgment to city in negligence case arising from city’s
failure to trim back trees that obstructed view of intersection);
City of Vidalia v. Brown, 237 Ga. App. 831, 833 (1999) (“[A] city
is liable for such defects [in streets and sidewalks] caused by
strangers or forces of nature, where the city had notice of the de-
fect and failed to exercise ordinary care to remove it, or where the
defect had existed for such a length of time that it would be rea-
sonable to conclude the city should have learned of the defect and
exercised ordinary care to remove it.”) (emphasis added); City of
Summerville v. Aldred, 101 Ga. App. 286, 288 (1960) (“The gen-
eral rule is that a municipal corporation is bound to keep its
streets in a reasonably safe condition for travel by the ordinary
modes, and will be liable for damages for injuries sustained in
consequence of its derelictions in this regard, no matter by what
cause the street may have become defective and unsafe where the
city knew, or should have known, of the defect in time to repair it
or to give warning of its existence.” (quotation marks omitted)).
Even the one decision the Court of Appeals cites in support of its




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rule made clear that the city in that case would have been liable
even without evidence that the city’s negligence caused a street-
light to malfunction if the city had “actual or constructive notice
of the problem.” Roquemore v. City of Forsyth, 274 Ga. App. 420,
423 (2005). In short, there is no such rule that a city may not be
liable for “passive failure[s]” to maintain a sidewalk as the Court
of Appeals’s language might be read to suggest.
        If that were the Court of Appeals’s only basis for concluding
that the City was entitled to summary judgment, I would vote to
grant Johnson’s petition to review this case. But it was not: the
Court of Appeals also concluded that Johnson had failed to show
a disputed question of fact with respect to the City’s (lack of) no-
tice of the uneven sidewalk in this case. Whether or not the Court
of Appeals was right about that, that factbound and case-specific
holding is not the kind of decision that meets our Court’s standard
for granting a writ of certiorari. 2 And because that alternative
holding was an independently sufficient basis for concluding that
the City was entitled to summary judgment on the negligence
claim against it, any decision we could reach with respect to the
court’s “passive failure to maintain” language would have no ef-
fect on the Court of Appeals’s ultimate judgment on that claim.
We ordinarily do not grant certiorari review when resolving the
legal question that would warrant such review could not possibly
have any effect on the outcome of the case. Cf. Cobb County v.
Floam, 319 Ga. 89, 89 (2024) (“Courts are not vehicles for engag-
ing in merely academic debates or deciding purely theoretical
questions.” (quotation marks omitted)).
      So, I agree that this case does not meet our standard for
granting a writ of certiorari, and for that reason, I join the Court’s

       2 The same goes for the Court of Appeals’s conclusion that the City was
entitled to summary judgment on the nuisance claim against it.




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decision to deny the petition. But if the Court of Appeals’s lan-
guage drawing a distinction between “passive” and “affirmative”
conduct persists as a possible basis for relieving a city from liabil-
ity for negligent maintenance of its streets or sidewalks, I would
grant review in an appropriate case to address it.
       I am authorized to state that Chief Justice Peterson, Pre-
siding Justice Warren, Justice Bethel, Justice Ellington, Justice
McMillian, Justice LaGrua, Justice Colvin, and Justice Land join
this concurrence.




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