ACT: Who repairs a stop valve that serves multiple units?

Question: Our complex has stop valves serving one, two or three units, and it’s unclear who’s responsible for repairs. What are the owners corporation’s obligations?

We live in a 50 year old Class B residential complex in the ACT. Recently the question ‘who pays for repairs to damaged stop valves’ has arisen.

While generally the owners corporation (OC) is responsible for the common stop valves and unit holders for those on their properties, several stop valves provide water to two lots and several also to three lots. In other cases, the stop valve providing water to a single lot appears to be located on common land.

The OC has, in the past, funded some repairs and not others, with reasons behind their decisions unclear, causing uncertainty about where responsibility lies.

Are you able to provide advice on the OC’s obligation to manage repair of the various combinations of stop valve locations in the complex?

We have read this article on LookUpStrata, ‘I Can’t Turn Off My Water. Who Repairs the Stop Cock?’, and while the response discusses where the OC has responsibility for three stop cocks for 24 units and owners are unable to turn off water, it does not address unit owners’ responsibility for individual stop cocks (which they can turn on and off). Advice from the strata manager is that individual stop valves are not an owners corporation responsibility.

Answer: Unit owners are responsible for utility services that exclusively serve their own unit. The owners corporation is responsible for anything shared.

Under the Unit Titles Act 2001, unit owners are currently responsible for maintaining utility services that exclusively service their unit. However, it may be considered fairer for the owners corporation to pass a resolution and vary the rules so that it assumes responsibility for all water meters, regardless of their location.

Below is a general guide for responsibility:

• Any pipe, cable, ducting, conduit, taps, or light switches:
  • If it is for the exclusive use of the unit (e.g., a branch line that only benefits one or a few units), then maintenance and repairs are the unit owner’s responsibility.
  • If it is part of the main or common line servicing more than one unit, then maintenance and repairs are the owners corporation’s responsibility.
• Stop cock to a unit, unit owner responsibility
• Main stop cock to the development, owners corporation responsibility

Section 24, maintenance obligations

Under section 24 of the Unit Titles (Management) Act 2011, an owners corporation for a unit plan must maintain the following:

1. for a staged development, the common property included in a completed stage of the development;
2. for a development that is not a staged development, the common property;
3. other property that it holds;
4. the defined parts of any building containing class A units (whether or not the defined parts are common property);
5. if a utility service mentioned in the Unit Titles Act 2001, section 35 (easements given by this Act) is provided for the potential benefit of all units, facilities associated with the provision of the utility services, including utility conduits.

Note: This does not include painting, unless the painting is required because of other maintenance (see section 26(1)).

This post appears in Strata News #806.

Jan Browne
Bridge Strata
E: jan@bridgestrata.com.au
P: 02 6109 7700