Update: Officials not delegated to communicate with Clrs – CoE
“No official is delegated to engage with any councillor nor to provide any information outside the formal channel of communication via the office of the MMC and the oversight committee.”
The City of Ekurhuleni announced that if councillors wished to obtain the monthly tribunal schedules, then the relevant authorisation must be obtained from the office of the MMC and the oversight committee.
This comes after shadow MMC of city planning Heather Hart raised concerns about the lack of communication from the City of Ekurhuleni’s city planning department’s tribunal officials.
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The NEWS published Hart’s concerns in the May 5 edition’s article titled Lack of feedback from CoE concerns Hart. Divisional head of communications and media relations for the CoE Nhlanhla Cebekhulu said communication with city planning officials is done through the oversight committee.
“No official is delegated to engage with any councillor nor to provide any information outside the formal channel of communication via the office of the MMC and the oversight committee,” said Cebekhulu.
Cebekhulu said the City’s tribunal section is capable of notifying the applicant and all objectors of a pending EMPT hearing.
“We do not require the assistance of a councillor in this regard. Should a ward councillor have provided negative comments for a specific application, then that councillor will be invited to the tribunal hearing for them to provide their arguments to the committee.”
Cebekhulu highlighted that during the current Covid-19 regulations and the fact that the South African Post Office is not operating at full capacity, notifications are sent via email to all parties concerned.
“There should be no situation that arises where both the applicant and objectors have not been informed of a specific tribunal meeting.”
Cebekhulu said in terms of the City of Ekurhuleni’s SPLUMA by-law 2019, the practice of informing all interested and affected parties via email will continue for the foreseeable future.
As your trusted community newspaper, the NEWS takes pride in being your community watchdog that holds those in power accountable. Through regular liaising and relationship-building with our local authorities, we are often able to update readers on municipal matters in the public interest.
At the NEWS, we want to ensure consistent and quality feedback from the City in response to our media queries. To monitor this, the NEWS introduced a five-star rating system.
Once we relay our readers’ pressing questions to the CoE, we will be rating their response according to a five-star scoring system allocated as follows.
Two stars will equate to all questions answered (either direct or indirect), two stars will equate to the relevancy of answers to questions posed and the remaining star will be attributed to adherence to the deadline for comment.
As CoE served in this discord, the NEWS rated this reply with three stars = two stars for questions answered, one star for answer relevancy, zero star for deadline met.
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