The Johannesburg city council’s new provisional general valuation roll is now up for formal objections, executive mayor Amos Masondo said in his State of the City address in Braamfontein on Thursday.
Completed in December, the roll contains 784 324 entries, 156 499 of them individual sectional-title units.
Masondo said the council received 11 086 written and telephonic queries about the provisional roll before it was finalised, and 20 136 hits 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 can be viewed at people 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 are starting to pay off, but that ”much more work” still needs to be done.
Of particular concern was the failure of any closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in the CBD to capture the recent attack by taxi drivers and hawkers on a miniskirt-wearing woman at the city’s Noord Street taxi rank.
Masondo said the city is 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.”
Saving electricity
Regarding electricity, Masondo said Johannesburg consumes 10% of the 37 000MW of electricity generated by Eskom every day.
He said big consumers have agreed to cut back their electricity usage by 10% and that 300 000 households will be supplied with energy-efficient light bulbs over the next six months.
The city also plans 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 are in addition to the installation of geyser ripple controls, solar-powered traffic lights and solar water heaters.
Masondo said the council has budgeted more than R170-million to upgrade pavements, street lighting, street trees and street furniture in the next year and that work has already started in Hillbrow, Berea and Yeoville. ”We expect the private sector to contribute a share of the costs.”
The council is 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 have started describing the inner city as cleaner and more ordered, he said.
Committed to ensuring all the city’s people have access to decent and affordable housing, the council is also stepping up the formalisation of informal settlements, said Masondo. Forty-three settlements were formalised between July and December, with another 37 to be finalised by June.
Another key focus is the conversion of hostels to self-contained family units, with 336 units completed so far and 1 160 more units to be delivered by the end of the year.
Masondo said there is a ”dire” need for rental housing for the poor. ”To this end, we have a target to deliver 15 000 rental housing units by 2010. To date, 2 430 units have been completed. We intend to deliver an additional 3 800 by the end of the year,” he said. — Sapa