Hit by a City Truck or a Snowplow? You May Have 182 Days, Not Three Years.
Most people injured in a Colorado crash operate on a comfortable assumption about time. The statute of limitations for a motor vehicle claim is three years. There is no rush to call anyone. Get treatment, see how the injuries settle out, deal with the legal side when life stabilizes.
That assumption is correct right up until the vehicle that hit you belongs to a government. A county dump truck. A CDOT plow. A transit bus. A city utility van. A school district vehicle. The moment a public entity is on the other side of the claim, a completely different set of rules applies, and the most important one is a written notice deadline that runs out in 182 days. Miss it and the claim is gone permanently, no matter how clear the liability, no matter how severe the injury, no matter how much time is left on the three year statute of limitations.
Why Government Claims Follow Different Rules
Colorado, like most states, starts from the position that government entities cannot be sued in tort at all. The Colorado Governmental Immunity Act replaced the old common law doctrine of sovereign immunity with a statutory scheme that grants public entities broad immunity and then waives that immunity in a specific, limited list of situations.
Everything about a claim against a public entity flows from that structure. You are not simply filing an ordinary negligence claim against a defendant who happens to be a city. You are asserting that your case fits inside a narrow statutory exception to a general rule of immunity, and you have to satisfy procedural requirements that ordinary defendants cannot invoke.
The 182 Day Notice Is Jurisdictional
Under C.R.S. 24-10-109, anyone claiming injury caused by a public entity or by a public employee acting in the course of employment must file a written notice of claim within 182 days after discovering the injury. The statute states plainly that compliance is a jurisdictional prerequisite and that failure to comply forever bars the action.
The word jurisdictional is doing enormous work in that sentence. It means the deadline is not an affirmative defense the government has to raise and preserve. It is a limit on the court’s power to hear the case at all. A judge can raise it on their own. It can surface late in litigation. It does not bend for a sympathetic plaintiff, a devastating injury, or a defendant who clearly caused the crash. Colorado courts have applied it as written for decades.
The statute also runs regardless of whether you have figured out the legal shape of your claim. The notice period begins when you discover the injury, not when you understand that you have a cause of action, not when you learn the name of the driver, and not when you finish treatment.
The Clock Runs From Discovery, Not From the Crash
In a straightforward collision, discovery and the crash are the same day, and the 182 day count starts immediately. But discovery is a real legal concept and it does matter in a subset of cases.
The period runs from the date the injured person knew or reasonably should have known of the injury and its cause. Consider a driver who walks away from a low speed impact with a public works truck feeling shaken but functional, then develops progressive cognitive symptoms over the following weeks and is eventually diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury whose symptoms surfaced late. Consider a passenger whose back pain is treated as a soft tissue strain for two months before imaging reveals a disc herniation. In cases like these, when the clock started is a genuine question with real consequences.
It is also not a question anyone should want to litigate. The safe course is to treat the date of the incident as the start of the count and send notice well inside the window. Arguing about discovery is a fallback position, not a plan.
Who Counts as a Public Entity
Broader than most people expect. The category takes in the State of Colorado and its agencies, counties, cities and towns, school districts, transit agencies, public hospital authorities, and the many special districts that handle water, sanitation, fire protection, and recreation across Douglas County and the surrounding communities.
The identity of the responsible entity is frequently not obvious at the scene. A road may be maintained by the state on one segment and by the county a mile later. A vehicle with a municipal seal may belong to a contractor rather than the city. A crash at an intersection may implicate both the driver who ran the light and the entity responsible for a signal that had been malfunctioning for weeks. Sending notice to the wrong entity does not satisfy the statute, which is one reason identifying the correct recipient is early work rather than later work. Our page on crashes involving government vehicles covers how those investigations typically unfold.
Immunity Is Waived Only in Specific Situations
Sending timely notice gets you through the door. It does not establish that the government can be held liable. The claim still has to fit one of the statutory waivers, and the ones that matter most in injury cases are narrower than they first appear.
Operation of a Public Vehicle
Immunity is waived for injuries resulting from the operation of a motor vehicle owned or leased by a public entity and operated by a public employee within the scope of employment. There is a significant carve out for emergency vehicles operating as emergency vehicles, which frequently becomes the central dispute in claims involving police cruisers, fire apparatus, and ambulances.
Dangerous Conditions of Roads and Public Buildings
Immunity is also waived for injuries caused by a dangerous condition of a public building, and for a dangerous condition of a public highway, road, or street that physically interferes with the movement of traffic. That last phrase is a real limitation. Colorado courts read it narrowly, and many road defect theories that seem intuitively compelling to an injured person do not clear the statutory language. Whether a particular pothole, washed out shoulder, obscured sign, or failed signal falls inside the waiver is a fact intensive question that often requires a preliminary evidentiary hearing before the merits are ever reached.
What the Notice Has to Contain
The statute specifies the contents. The notice must include the claimant’s name and address and the name and address of any attorney representing them, a concise statement of the factual basis of the claim including the date, time, place, and circumstances of the event, the name and address of any public employee involved if known, a concise statement of the nature and extent of the injury claimed, and a statement of the amount of monetary damages being requested.
That last element deserves attention. You are being asked to state a damages figure early, sometimes before treatment has concluded and before the long term picture is clear. Getting that number wrong in either direction has consequences, and it is one of the more common reasons a notice drafted without counsel creates problems that surface much later.
Recovery Is Capped, and the Cap Just Moved
Even a claim that clears every procedural hurdle runs into a ceiling. The Act limits the total recoverable from public entities and employees in a single occurrence. For claims accruing on or after January 1, 2026 and before January 1, 2030, those limits are $505,000 for injury to one person in a single occurrence and $1,421,000 where two or more people are injured, with no individual recovering more than $505,000. The figures for claims that accrued between January 1, 2022 and January 1, 2026 were $424,000 and $1,195,000. These amounts are adjusted every four years and published by the Colorado Secretary of State in a certificate of limitations on judgments.
Two consequences follow. In a multi vehicle crash with several badly hurt people, the per occurrence limit can be exhausted well before anyone is made whole. And in a catastrophic case, the government cap sits far below the $1,500,000 noneconomic ceiling that applies in ordinary Colorado injury litigation. Identifying every non governmental party who may share liability is therefore not an academic exercise. It is often the difference between a capped recovery and an adequate one.
You Also Have to Wait Before Filing
One more procedural wrinkle catches people who move quickly. After filing timely notice, you cannot commence the lawsuit until the public entity denies the claim or 90 days have passed since the notice was filed, whichever happens first. So the sequence is compressed at one end and delayed at the other, and both deadlines have to be tracked against the underlying statute of limitations, which continues running the entire time.
What to Do in the First Week
Photograph the vehicle, including any agency markings, unit numbers, and license plates. Get the police report and note which agency responded and which agency owns the roadway. Seek medical attention the same day and describe every symptom, including the ones that seem minor. Write down what happened while the sequence is fresh. And treat the 182 days as though it were 60, because identifying the correct entity, gathering the facts the notice requires, and getting it served properly takes longer than anyone expects.
Talk to a Colorado Injury Lawyer
Rampart Injury Lawyers represents injured people in Castle Rock, Douglas County, and along the I-25 corridor from Greenwood Village to Colorado Springs. Todd Travis and Jordan Travis have handled Colorado injury and wrongful death claims for more than three decades combined, including cases against public entities where the procedural requirements decide whether a claim survives at all. If a government vehicle, a public road, or a public facility played any part in how you were hurt, the deadline is already running. Contact our office for a free consultation with an attorney.
