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Willard v. Parsons Hill Partnership8/5/2005
to constitute a breach of the warranty of habitability and intends to hold the landlord accountable in damages if the problem is not corrected in a reasonable time." In defendants' view, a landlord may . . . be aware of a contaminant in the water supply but may nevertheless believe that the premises are perfectly habitable because the levels of contamination are low, or because the state officials are aware of the contaminant and have permitted continued occupancy and use of the water." The warranty of habitability does not, however, cover minor defects that an ordinary person would grudgingly tolerate or those that a government entity in charge of public health would allow to persist without taking some action to protect the residents. Instead, it covers those defects that materially affect health and safety. 9 V.S.A. ยง 4458(a); Hilder, 144 Vt. at 160-61, 478 A.2d at 208-09. When, as here, the State's health department has established standards for safe levels of a contaminant in the residential water supply, has notified the landlord in writing that water in her building exceeds those levels, has imposed a "Do Not Drink" advisory for that water, and has relied on the landlord to notify the tenants and to make reasonable accommodations for a substitute water supply, the landlord has received all the notice the landlord is due. Additional notice from a tenant prior to a lawsuit by that tenant is of little value at that point, and we cannot agree that the Legislature intended to impose such a requirement in cases like this one.
26. We have observed, however, that the RRAA's overriding purpose was to codify the common-law relationship between landlords and tenants. Vt. Tenants, Inc., 170 Vt. at 86, 742 A.2d at 751. Nonetheless, because we conclude that the statutory notice provision's manifest purpose is to ensure that landlords are not held liable for contract damages because of breaches of the warranty of habitability of which they were unaware, and thus had no opportunity to timely cure, we see no evidence of any legislative intent to preempt or change the common law on latent defects. Accordingly, we interpret the statute to achieve balance between tenant and landlord protections, leaving undisturbed consistent common-law rights that existed in habitability situations not clearly governed by the statute. See Estate of Kelley v. Moguls, Inc., 160 Vt. 531, 533, 632 A.2d 360, 362 (1993) (permitting common-law negligence action where not expressly foreclosed by Dram Shop Act, and where legislative history supports view that Legislature did not intend to preempt it); Klittner v. Steiner, 158 Vt. 654, 655, 610 A.2d 149, 150 (1992) (mem.) (recognizing that where statute does not expressly foreclose a common-law cause of action, the common law lying outside the scope of a statute survives); cf. Vt. Tenants, Inc., 170 Vt. at 84-85, 742 A.2d at 750 (recognizing that where Legislature could have explicitly drafted RRAA to deal with mortgagee taking title under strict foreclosure, but failed to do so, Court interprets Legislature's silence as indication that it did not intend to cover situation, particularly where application of statute would modify substantive common-law rights of mortgagee in many cases).
27. In sum, at common law, the warranty of habitability covered all patent and latent defects. The statute cannot be applied to this case involving a latent defect because its enforcement provisions appear tailored only for cases based on patent defects. Specifically, the notice provision, which serves an obvious and important purpose of protecting landlord rights in patent habitability defect cases, has no discernible purpose in latent defect cases where landlords already have actual written notice of a
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