#23765
Sir Humphrey
Strataguru

    Unless there is some Victorian peculiarity that I am unaware of as an ACT resident, and if the driveway is entirely within your unit area, then you would be responsible for maintenance. The OC would not be maintaining it or even sending anyone to enter your unit area except to deal with an emergency (say, a burst water pipe while you are away) and so it would not be sending you an invoice for work done.

    Conceivably, there could have been a resolution of a general meeting at some time that the OC would maintain all the driveways. The ACT has a provision that the OC could resolve to undertake maintenance that might otherwise be a unit owner’s responsibility. Eg. it might have been decided that the development would look better and there might be an economy of scale to everyone’s benefit if all the units were regularly repainted at the same time by one contractor arranged by the EC. You might have some similar provision for maintaining all the driveways?

    However, are you sure the driveway is not on common property? In our OC some units have carports within their unit area but their driveways cross common property to join the shared roadway. The unit owner has always been assumed to have the responsibility to repair and maintain the driveway that only that unit owner uses. This is fair since some are plain gravel but others are paved in diverse ways: simple, cheap or expensive. We are about to formalise this in a rule that would explicitly state that the unit owner maintains. However, we have a provision in the proposed rule that the OC can step in to make a repair to make the driveway safe if the unit owner has not responded in a reasonable time to make the repair. Then the OC can recover its costs from the unit owner.