The Johannesburg’ city council’s new provisional general valuation roll is now open for formal objections, executive mayor Amos Masondo said in his state of the city address in Braamfontein on Thursday.
The roll contains 784Â 324 entries — 156Â 499 of them individual sectional-title units, and was completed in December.
Masondo said the council received 11Â 086 written and telephonic queries about the provisional roll before it was finalised, and 20Â 136 page views on its website.
”We are now at a stage where we are putting the roll out for a formal objection process,” he said, adding that the roll could be viewed at people’s centres and on the council’s website.
”I have observed in the new valuation that there is a special category of properties which requires further engagement.
”I have requested the administration team to meet with both the relevant residents and business sectional property owners to engage further in order to clarify concerns,” said Masondo, urging property owners to ”engage with the city”.
He said efforts to clean up the inner-city were starting to pay off, but that ”much more work” still needed to be done.
Of particular concern was the failure of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) in the CBD to capture the recent attack by taxi drivers and hawkers on a woman wearing a mini-skirt at the city’s Noord Street taxi rank.
Masondo said the city was ahead of schedule in its plans to double the number of CCTV cameras in the city to 214 by June.
”All the cameras promised will be connected by the end of April. We have also committed dedicated response vehicles and personnel to react to incidents of crime or by-law infringement within minutes.”
Electricity
Regarding electricity, Masondo said Johannesburg consumed 10% of the 37Â 000MW of electricity generated by Eskom every day.
He said big consumers had agreed to cut back their electricity usage by 10% and that 300Â 000 households would be supplied with energy efficient light bulbs over the next six months.
The city also planned to reinstate its decommissioned diesel and gas turbines over the next six months, with a potential yield of 120MW, or 60% of the average load-shedding requirement.
These measures were in addition to the installation of geyser ripple controls, solar powered traffic lights and solar water heaters.
Masondo said the council had budgeted more than R170-million to upgrade pavements, street-lighting, street trees and street furniture in the next year and that work had already started in Hillbrow, Berea and Yeoville.
”We expect the private sector to contribute a share of the costs.”
The council was also seeing the benefits of its R100-million investment in a new block-by-block urban management system with regular law enforcement blitzes and inspections, said Masondo.
Communities and investors had started describing the inner city as cleaner and more ordered, he said.
Housing
He said the council was also stepping up the formalisation of informal settlements, said Masondo.
He said 43 settlements were formalised between July and December, with another 37 to be finalised by June.
Another key focus was the conversion of hostels to self-contained family units, with 336 units completed so far and 1Â 160 more units to be delivered by the end of the year.
Masondo said there was a ”dire” need for rental housing for the poor.
”To this end we have a target to deliver 15Â 000 rental housing units by 2010. To date 2Â 430 units have been completed. We intend to deliver an additional 3Â 800 by the end of the year,” he said. – Sapa