The needs of the ward range from serious matters such as drug trading, human trafficking, hijacked buildings and prostitution to your more run of the mill matters such as billing issues, grass cutting, power failures, water outages, streetlights that don’t work and road markings that need to be repainted.
These are just some of the issues that I have to deal with on a daily basis, while trying to strike a balance to get to all of the issues resolved that are spread across the ward and the different communities. It is also challenging to resolve many of these challenges, but I endeavour to give my best efforts to resolve them at any given time.
Something that has made my job challenging at times has been the national lockdown. Initially, the City only allowed five entities to operate, namely City Power, Joburg Water, Johannesburg Roads Agency, JMPD, and Metro Bus could operate with a skeleton staff. Other critical entities such as City Parks and the Billing Centres were not allowed to operate.
Now that things have eased up a little bit more it means municipal entities can operate. However, most of them still only have a 30 per cent staff component and their depots are often forced to temporarily close when they come across staff members who have tested positive for Covid-19.
The requests for food parcels in the ward also rose sharply as, many residents were not able to work or run their businesses.
As the elected ward councillor, my job is to conduct oversight over the City’s executive, which consists of the executive mayor councillor Geoffrey Makhubo and his respective Members of the Mayoral Committees, which I take very seriously.
However, this role has been stifled somewhat recently as for a long period during the lockdown we were unable to hold council and Section 79 meetings where we get to study the reports that are submitted and ask questions.
What I also find frustrating is that I am limited to only three questions per meeting when I have a whole host of questions that I need to ask. Council meetings are now taking place via a virtual means which has also come with its tribulations as meetings have collapsed due to disputes over the accurate number of councillors in attendance, connectivity issues and not wanting the meeting to run too late due to the curfew.
In terms of the way forward I am going to continuously engage with the respective depots and MMC’s, will continue to submit questions to council and, if necessary, I will submit motions to the council.
Now that the lockdown regulations have eased somewhat, I also regularly get the various stakeholders together and have site meetings. It is also important for residents to continue to make submissions to the integrated development plan to try and get their proposals placed into the annual budget cycle.
It is important to note though that even if a submission into the IDP is successful it might only be implemented over the course of the next few years and not necessarily the following financial year.
Here is a summary of my engagements with the various municipal entities:
City Power
Probably my biggest concern as a ward councillor has been the frequent and lengthy outages that my residents have had to endure. Considering this I have managed to set up monthly meetings with the City Power depot manager and his team leaders.
One of the critical outcomes of these meetings is that they have agreed to conduct an audit of all the illegal connections and backyard dwellings within the ward. This is very important as one of the reasons why the power goes off so often is because the grid is overloaded due to illegal connections.
Joburg Water
Over the past few years there have been several occasions where residents that are being supplied by the Forest Hill water tower have experienced water outages. I have engaged with the Joburg Water general manager extensively about possibly getting a new water tower installed.
However, the metro insists that according to the hydraulics report the existing water tower should still be adequate to supply water for another five to 10 years. Apparently the water interruptions have been as a result mainly due to power supply issues to the tower as the equipment requires power in order to run.
It seems they are able to cope with one set of load-shedding per day, but it becomes problematic when they experience intermittent power failures due to cable theft and trips at the substation. In an attempt to mitigate this, they have put out a tender for a generator to be installed by the tower on three different occasions but each time the respective bidders were not successful due to either under or over quoting. It is now going to be advertised for a fourth time in the next fortnight.
The tender will be advertised on the Joburg Water website and in various newspapers.
JMPD
With by law enforcement and law enforcement in general being a major concern within the ward I find myself engaging with the JMPD on an almost daily basis.
I have interactions with the Region F2 officers, the by-law unit and the K9 unit. These engagements have reaped results, but it is not easy in a ward that sits with a number of law enforcement issues. Ideally, I wish that our city would adopt a broken window policy where all minor infringements are clamped down immediately.
Pikitup
Pikitup is quite good about letting me know when they aren’t able to cover certain rounds which I then disseminate to the community WhatsApp groups and onto my Facebook page.
If a community member lets me know that refuse in their street weren’t collected, then they are generally helpful by arranging for it to be collected the following day. They are also helpful with clearing refuse that has been illegally dumped. However, the rate at which some of communities dump far exceeds the rate at which Pikitup can collect.
As a result, I have engaged with them about conducting awareness campaigns around the dangers of dumping and littering in the suburbs.
Johannesburg Roads Agency
The agency is battling to fulfil its mandate of repairing potholes and re-tarring roads due to the asphalt plant being out of commission.
However, I am doing as much as I can to put pressure on them to execute their duties. My engagements with the JRA depot have resulted in the markings at certain roads and intersections being repainted.
Building control
I have been working with building control to deal with the illegal structures that are being built within the ward. There have been a few cases that were meant to be taken to court, but I have not had much feedback about the cases. The fact that the municipal court is not fully functional does not help.
GFIS
I have been engaging with the City’s Group Forensic and Investigation Services (GFIS) about acting against some of the hijacked buildings within the ward. There have been a few raids conducted as a result.
Ward 56 consists of ten suburbs, namely: Rosettenville, The Hill, Townsview, Oakdene, Eastcliff, La Rochelle (1st- 5th streets), most of Linmeyer, Towerby (South of Rifle Range Road), Gleneagles (North of the N12) and Glenanda North.
Michael Crichton
Councillor for Ward 56
Member of Section 79 Transport Committee
083 383 6366
