Legalbrief | your legal news hub Tuesday 28 September 2021 Cape Town scraps drought levy and introduces rewards map Cape Town continues to search for effective measures to mitigate the severe drought crisis confronting the city, scrapping a contentious drought levy while introducing an interactive map aimed at rewarding households that save water, writes Legalbrief. The proposal for the drought levy was withdrawn at a special sitting on Friday last week. According to a report on the allAfrica site, council members debated the proposal following a strong public backlash to the idea since it was mooted on 14 January. Opposition and ruling party councillors said a U-turn on the proposal should be strongly considered following the public's input, which included 55 000 from one web site alone. A report on the Mail & Guardian Online site notes that the special council meeting also voted both to limit Mayor Patricia De Lille’s powers to handle the drought crisis, and to introduce punitive tariff measures for residents. Deputy Mayor Ian Neilson introduced an amendment whereby De Lille’s statutory powers would remain the same, but her powers to deal with the drought unilaterally would now be shared by the mayoral committee as a whole. Reporting lines will also change, with executive director for water affairs Gisela Kaiser reporting final outcomes to Neilson and mayoral committee member for water affairs Xanthea Limberg. Before voting, De Lille raised objections to the amendment, saying she had not been consulted. In the end, 125 councillors voted for Neilson’s amendment, while 57 voted against it, and three abstained. Cape Town residents labelled the mooted drought levy as punitive, unfair and overtaxing. According to a Cape Argus report, the city received 66 000 comments on the drought levy, but just 36 444 were categorised, while the rest weren’t used. Just more than 34% of residents commented that it was unfair and punitive, 21.9% said the drought was due to bad planning and 14.57% said they were overtaxed. Residents were also opposed to the methodology using property values as a yardstick to determine the drought charge as opposed to water consumption. Instead of going ahead with a drought charge, the city is set to introduce a new punitive tariff for households using 6 000 litres of water or more a month. ‘The proposed drought charge is likely to be dropped after a massive outcry from Capetonians. We are now going to have to make deep cuts to important projects,’ De Lille is quoted in the report as saying. Level 6B water restrictions will be implemented on 1 February. This means residents have to reduce their water usage to 50l per person per day. The use of boreholes and well points will be restricted even more. Plans are also afoot in preparation for Day Zero. Once Day Zero kicks in and water collection points are activated, affected properties will be charged a flat rate of R104.88 a month to cover the costs of supplying water to collection points to ensure that an income is available to maintain the service. Meanwhile, Cape Town has launched a water map to help residents track their water usage. An SA News report quotes Mayor Patricia de Lille as saying: ‘Our water map marks residential properties using less than 10 500l per month with green dots. The map is a transparent tool and will assist in actively managing and reducing consumption to avoid Day Zero.’ Day Zero will come when dam levels reach 13.5% and most taps will be turned off. ‘Households with higher consumption may have many people living on the property or may have an undetected water leak. The city continues its interventions with these users,’ said De Lille. The map only shows consumption for free-standing houses and not cluster housing, flats or other land uses. In addition, the map shows consumption for the previous month and is updated around the third week of the following month. For example, January 2018 consumption information will be available in the third week of February 2018. ‘Neighbourhoods should have constructive engagements with one another to ensure that their neighbourhood is painted green. Mobilise groups in your area in order to collectively manage water consumption,’ said the mayor. She said about 54% of the city’s consumers were saving water to avoid the fast-approaching Day Zero, which was estimated to be on 22 April 2018. See ANALYSES section (below) And, as Day Zero looms, the Department of Water and Sanitation says it is preparing to extract the last 10% from the two remaining sources of water in the region. According to a HuffPost SA report, Trevor Balz, who is responsible for the department's drought-intervention programme, took to Twitter this weekend to announce the drastic measures, saying: ‘We are preparing ourselves to be able to extract the last 10% from the Voëlvlei and Theewaterskloof dams, and our construction teams will be working in those dams from the end of January onwards, so that we can extract all the water from what is commonly called “dead storage”.’ The extraction is well-timed, says Dr Kevin Winter, an academic and lecturer linked to the Future Water Research Institute at the University of Cape Town. ‘It makes sense to squeeze out as much as possible,’ the report quotes him as saying. Balzer also said the department would monitor the use of the Western Cape's groundwater, which is being used in large quantities by the agricultural sector, the report notes. Western Cape Premier Helen Zille wrote to President Jacob Zuma over the weekend to request that the drought in the Western Cape be declared a national disaster. A Cape Argus report notes that Zille said she had not received any feedback from Zuma’s office. In her weekly Daily Maverick column, Zille said given the current situation, the challenge exceeds anything a major city has had to face anywhere in the world since World War II or the 9/11 attacks in New York City. Colin Deiner, head of the Western Cape disaster risk management service, said the SANDF and SAPS would be ready to be deployed. A major trade union has criticised Cape Town for employing a PR agency to manage its drought response. While the ANC stole outside the legal framework, the DA ‘thieves’ in the City of Cape Town stole within the legal framework, Cosatu charged last week. According to a Mail & Guardian Online report, the trade union federation was responding to reports that the DA-run City of Cape Town was paying a public relations firm, Resolve Communications, headed by its former leader Tony Leon and communications director Nick Clelland, R658 000 to improve the City’s drought crisis communication. Cosatu spokesperson Sizwe Pamla said the reports added to the ‘new brand of corruption’ emerging from the DA since Cape Town City manager Achmat Ebrahim stepped down. ‘Tony Leon and an ex-employee of the City of Cape Town are being paid half a million rand to tell Capetonians that it is not raining,’ Pamla said. Resolve Communications Lauren Kent said Cosatu’s ‘statement is not worth responding to’. ‘It is a vast undertaking to develop programmes that can reach each and every resident. Resolve provides guidance on how best this can be achieved,’ the city said. ‘Changing behaviour is more cost-effective than building new infrastructure.’ And, a scientist has warned that the city's desalination efforts may backfire. After the City of Cape Town spent at least half a billion rand to build desalination plants, the ‘purified’ seawater these produce would have been cleared of little more than floating nappies and junk before it was declared safe to drink – despite the presence of organisms such as E. coli, SA researchers warned. According to a Mail & Guardian Online report, University of Western Cape Chemistry Professor Leslie Petrik said last week: ‘Almost no treatment, other than screening for large objects like nappies, is done on the sewage being released into the ocean hourly in large volumes all along our coastline. Moreover … many inland sewerage facilities are not working properly and the effluent released from these poor facilities are highly contaminated and polluting our rivers and dams.’ ‘This effluent is also being transported to the ocean. Any water intake from river, dam or ocean will be contaminated,’ Petrik said. Last year, Petrik and other researchers from three SA universities published an article in the South African Journal of Science on the probable public health risk posed by the planned desalination plants in Cape Town. ‘The biggest problem is that our national water guidelines do not require statutory testing for persistent pollutants,’ Petrik said. De Lille said the city had appointed an emergency water augmentation environmental monitoring committee, which included national, provincial and local government officials, to monitor the health risk..