Service delivery march - 12th September

In conjunction with FEKRRA (Federation of Kouga Ratepayers and Residents Associations), the St Francis Bay Residents Association has planned a service delivery march to the municipal offices in Jeffreys Bay on Wednesday 12th September.  

The idea is to meet at the beach front parking area opposite the Spur Restaurant adjacent to Diaz Road in Jeffreys Bay at 9:30am with the march to convene at 10:00am.  The march will proceed through Jeffreys Bay to the council offices in Da Gama Street.  Each town’s Residents Association will then hand over their ‘Memorandum of Grievances.’  We are required to have approx 40 marshals all of whom we will issue with an arm band and each town will be responsible for their own placards.  The St Francis Bay Residents Association will organise for 50 placards to be printed.

For this march to be successful it needs to be representative of the entire community.  We strongly urge all businesses to allow their staff time off to participate as well as organising transport for them to attend if possible.  

The Jeffreys Bay Residents Association supports this march and encourages all its members to join in on Wednesday 12th September at 9.30am.

If anyone is willing to volunteer as a marshall on the day, please contact Paul Hjul on 071 956 5953.

J Bay Residents Association Communication Overview

One of the main goals of the J Bay Residents Association (Jbayra) is to improve communications between members on matters of interest to the town. We have setup quite a sophisticated infrastructure to help reach this goal, catering for different tastes and levels of computer knowledge. This article brings together all the different communication channels in one place.

1. The website – www.jbayra.com
   
   This is one of our most important resources. On the website you can
1. Link to many other useful J Bay websites
2. On the News page, read about recent developments in the town
3. On the Afrikaans page, read a Q&A about the JBRA, meet the committee, see the JBRA constitution, learn how to join the JBRA, or simply contact us, in Afrikaans.
4. On the English page, you can do all the above in English.
5. On the Info page, see a list of emergency and Municipality contact numbers, download useful forms, view a detailed map of J Bay, and read about the history of J Bay.
6. Plus many other useful features.
   
   
2. The blog - http://jbayra.blogspot.com/
   
   Articles of interest to our town and area are published on the blog, where anyone can read and comment on them. You can register on the blog to receive email notification whenever a new article is published. You can read past articles in the archive. If you would like to submit an article of your own for publication, simply email it to admin@jbayra.com.
   The blog is meant to encourage open and lively debate by residents on the issues confronting the town. You can comment anonymously if you want to.
   
   
3. The email discussion group - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/jag1
   
   If your computer expertise doesn’t extend much beyond emails, then this is the group for you. You can join the group by visiting the address above, or you can request an invitation to join by sending an email to admin@jbayra.com. Once registered, you can contribute your opinion to the J Bay Activities Group just by sending an email to jag1@googlegroups.com. You will also receive opinions and comments from everybody else in the jag1 googlegroup. It’s a great way to conduct a fast and furious conversation with your fellow residents. If it all gets too much for you, you can limit what you receive, or leave the group at any time.
   
   
4. The Facebook Group - http://www.facebook.com/groups/362765243790458/
   
   If you are addicted to Facebook, then join our Facebook group, called Jbay Residents Association. Invite your friends and neighbours. Share your opinion. Just do it!
   
   
5. Mobilitate Issue Reporting – www.mobilitate.co.za
   
   Some very kind people in Centurion have spent a vast amount of time and money setting up a superb website for municipal oversight, which they make available for FREE. On this website you can
1. Log issues such as potholes, fire hazards, poor service, etc
2. Have these issues automatically escalated to your ward councillor and municipal manager
3. Get stats on all issues logged in your area, responses by councillors and managers, see comments from other residents, etc.
4. Get up to date contact details for your municipality, ward, residents association and community policing forum.
5. Log all crimes committed in your area, view them on a map, gets crime stats, share information with other residents.
6. Get free SMS notification of crime and safety alerts, such as bridge collapse, suspicious characters, etc.
7. And much more.
   
   To take full advantage of Mobilitate you must first register on their website. You can use your Facebook account to register and login very simply.
   
   
6.  Mobilitate Crimespotter -  http://gotcha.crimespotter.co.za
   
   This is a facility within the Mobilitate website to setup a Community Policing Forum (CPF) on which crimes and crime alerts can be logged, displayed on a map, communicated to other CPF members (by email and SMS), and manage neighbourhood watch patrols.
   You don’t have to rely on dubious annual police stats to know what is going on in your own area.

All of these facilities depend totally on one thing – the willingness of Jeffreys Bay Residents to use them! 

You can proudly claim that you are not computer literate enough, that you are too old for these things, that its too complicated, that no one is interested in your opinion, that you don’t want to look like a fool in public, that nobody reads this stuff anyway, that nothing will happen or be done, that its all just a waste of time. 

Or you can do something. You can take a risk. You can make the effort. Its up to you.

Dial F for Failure: SA's local government disaster

A good article and book review on the problems with Local Government at http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-08-03-dial-f-for-failure-sas-local-government-disaster

Trevor Watkins

Ideological Drive Project (IDP) a short review

Please note: This represents my personal opinion

 

The Kouga 2012-2017 Integrated Development Plan is a curious mix of desktop research and pure fiction, something clearly not envisaged by the Municipal Systems Act. On the one hand it is unfortunate that the “development plan” not only has legal force but it is binding for the most part on the municipality for five years (by which point a new set of fantasy is likely to take over), on the other hand the we have no reason to believe that the municipality will comply with their own IDP any more than they do to any other set of rules or regulations. What is clear though is that the document is nothing other than a project to drive an ideological position that despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary the Kouga Municipality is a well run progressive entity that is hamstrung by mistakes of the past (code for apartheid and that component of the previous administration which the current administration have political disputes with).

Curiously despite the IDP and draft budget being presented in public meetings together the two documents contradict each other with the curious case of the budget assuming a collection rate of 95% and the IDP striving for 90% – perhaps the 5% shortfall can be recovered by recouping some of the monies wasted on municipal graft.

There are intriguing tales of public meetings being held regularly and that 15 of the 15 ward committee are functioning. I greatly look forward to meeting a Community Development Worker in Jeffrey’s Bay such that he/she may tell me about these regular public meetings. More importantly I look forward to my next visit to the previously vacant monstrosity that is the Ward 11 office which as of two weeks ago was an unused empty building because according the IDP “the Municipality has established offices for the Ward Councillors, they have Ward coordinators, secretaries and the offices are well resourced”.

If you are in the market for a tragic welding together of systemic failure and wasted opportunities the Kouga IDP document is well worth a read, otherwise it is simply 250 pages of evidence that Jeffrey’s Bay is a nice town in spite of the Kouga Municipality.

How municipalities profit from electricity.

Extracted from Moneyweb. 

Author: Malcolm Rees |

28 March 2012 14:40

JOHANNESBURG - Electricity surcharges by municipalities have become yet another "tax" for businesses in the country.

According to lead economist and an expert on SA’s electricity prices, Mike Schüssler, municipalities in the country are charging consumers for electricity at prices well in excess of the base price they pay for to Eskom.

The average domestic gross operating margin for municipalities on electricity (the difference between the price paid for electricity and the price charged for it) sits in the region of 40%, says Schüssler.

“I can promise you that Spar doesn’t have that sort of a margin, nor does Pick n Pay or anybody else,” he notes.

“For the municipalities and local government electricity is a big source of revenue.”

The latest data from Statistics South Africa indicate that in the last financial year municipalities received R61.9bn from customers (excluding non payments) and paid R40.7bn for that electricity indicating that municipalities get nearly 52% more for electricity than they pay for it.

That is a gross operating margin of 34%, according to Schüssler  “which is lower than was the case some years ago”.

However, exacerbating the price discrepancy the fact that the calculated margin excludes money lost to bad debt.

Adding about R6.8bn in unpaid electricity bills (over 90 days old) would indicate that the actual operating margin is over 40%

“What happens is that business tariffs in a place like Johannesburg are more expensive than those of Eskom; that fact is that businesses are used as a way to get taxes,” says Schüssler.

“Effectively, on a local level, electricity is a tax collection exercise.”

But the price discrepancy “is also true of people who pay electricity on a household side”, he says.

For the financial year ending June 2011, municipalities generated an combined revenue in the region of R204bn, according to Schüssler.

Of that, R58bn is outstanding revenue (unpaid bills aged over 90 days) some of which has been accumulated in years prior.

A significant component of the net revenue is attributable to electricity revenue, while water, which has also been increasing in double digits for the past three years, takes up another large chunk.

Based on these figures “you could say that overall municipalities generate very close to 7% of SA’s gross domestic product (GDP)”, according to Schüssler.

Considering what municipalities charge for water and electricity and the margins they add to the cost of water and electricity, “they don’t just have a 1% tax rate on the economy as we thought but its probably closer to between 3% and 4%”, he says.

JBRA Chairman's report for 2011/12

Jeffreys Bay Residents Association

Chairmans report delivered at AGM on 22^nd February 2012

Fellow residents, honoured guests, councillors and members of the JBRA committee,

It is my honour and duty to present the chairman’s report for our residents association for the past year. I wish to start by thanking the members of the committee for their efforts, particularly those who have survived an entire year.

When I accepted the position of chairman of the JBRA at the last AGM I set 3 major goals for the year. The first goal was to increase membership, the second goal was to engage effectively with the Kouga Municipality, and the third goal was to participate effectively in FEKRRA, the federation of residents associations.

The major reason for increasing membership is to improve communication within the Jeffreys Bay community. Our aim was to get current contact information for as many residents as possible by registering them in our database. The second reason is to be able to speak with authority when negotiating with the Kouga Municipality. Politicians are only impressed by the number of voters you represent. Although the JBRA needs an income to do its job effectively, increased membership income was never a major consideration.

Total registered membership of the JBRA now sits at 700 residents, an approximately 10-fold increase over the membership for the previous year. Of these 700, 181 have paid the annual fee and may vote at meetings such as this. Based on this registered membership, the JBRA is now the biggest and one of the most active residents associations in Kouga.

Our second goal was to engage effectively with the Kouga Municipality. The committee has had numerous high level meetings with the KM, submitted many documents, requests and demands, published articles on our blog and in the local press, largely to no avail. I regret to say that our impact on the governance of Kouga has been minimal. By and large, our many suggestions and requests have been ignored.  This frustration is shared by the other residents associations in FEKRRA, and was raised again with the mayor and MM at a meeting this morning. The JBRA has setup a system for filing individual disputes with the KM, which may assist in getting some issues resolved more effectively.

Our third goal was to participate effectively in FEKRRA. After the unfortunate death of Joe Oosthuizen, the FEKRRA chairman, this organisation became very quiet.  About halfway through the year a new committee was elected, of which I am vice-chairman.  I assisted FEKRRA by setting up a website, and also helped setup a website for our sister RA in Paradise Beach/Aston Bay. FEKRRA has had 3 meetings with the KM since then, the last as recently as this morning. If FEKRRA’s demands are not met soon then we can expect legal action to follow in the near future.

The main task of a residents association is to improve communication, between members, with the municipality, and with the world at large. The Arab Spring has highlighted the importance of modern electronic communications in civil society.  A lot of effort this year has been devoted to improving communication to residents and between residents:

• A comprehensive website was setup at www.jbayra.com. Local news, useful documents, links to relevant local sites, calendars, maps, online registrations are all available on the website.
• A new blog was setup, and many articles were posted by the committee.
• The JAG email discussion group was established.
• The Mobilitate website was discovered and put to use for J Bay issues.
• The Crimespotter CPF facility was setup, including the emergency SMS facility. 
• A database of all members details is maintained, and regular emails and SMSs are sent to all registered members. 

Despite all this effort, the involvement of J Bay residents in these initiatives has been poor. 

• Very few read the blog, almost no one comments, and only 3 or 4 people have submitted articles to the blog in a year.
• Only 50 people replied to several hundred invitations to join the JAG email group.
• Only 50 people have joined the Crimespotter CPF, and no one has logged any crimes in the past several months.
• Only 2 or 3 people have logged any issues on the Mobilitate website. So far, only one of the 3 councillors in the JBRA area has managed to register themselves on Mobilitate and respond to the 50 or so issues logged there. 

There are lots of reasons for this apathy, but very few excuses.  Instead of a vibrant and dynamic exchange of ideas about J Bay and its circumstances, we have the spectacle of 2 or 3 people shouting down a hole, uncertain if anyone is actually listening.

The 2011 committee launched a number of initiatives in the course of the year:

• voting and non-voting membership
• Residents Projects, where residents undertake their own local civic maintenance, such as the cleanup undertaken by the committee during the municipal strike
• declaring individual disputes with the KM using a local lawyer
• a quarterly public meeting and a quarterly newsletter
• the Legal Watchdog committee
• the idea of issuing fines to the KM for services not correctly performed
• the proposal to form a consulting group to advise and assist the KM for free

I believe the JBRA was instrumental in

• having the new housing development in Ocean View sent for further investigation
• focussing attention on the billing fiasco at the KM
• focussing attention on issues such as sewage spills, brown water in Wavecrest, potholes, etc
• influencing the development of the 2012 IDP and budget
• focussing attention on financial irregularities in the KM
• resolving some issues at the J Bay Caravan Park

I believe that our new mayoral committee and council are somewhat better than the previous  disastrous bunch,  in the same way that a poke in just one eye with a sharp stick is better than a poke in both eyes.  The auditor general has declared the KM officially bankrupt, a fact which we pointed out 6 months ago. Like the rest of South Africa, the Kouga Municipality finds itself  dealing with the inevitable consequences of bad policies and bad management. This steady decline to 3^rd world standards can only be reversed when sensible policies are implemented by competent managers.

However, despite all the doom and gloom, most of us in this room stay in nice houses on clean streets with electricity, running water and reasonable sewage. That puts us way ahead of most of the rest of our fellow citizens in Kouga, a fact we forget at our peril.

In conclusion, I believe that the JBRA has made some significant strides in the last year, by increasing membership, by communicating better, by engaging with the KM regularly. However, I believe that the situation in J Bay has got worse in the last year, not better, and that much remains for the new committee to tackle.

Trevor Watkins

Gemors and remorse

This blog article is written by Trevor Watkins in his personal capacity, and not on behalf of the current or previous JBRA committee.

Having wreaked havoc within the ranks of the local DA, the “The Courier – Die Koerier” has now turned its school-masterly eye towards the Jeffreys Bay Residents Association. It is so easy to attack the people nearest you, while ignoring the real and dangerous opponents at a distance.

Japie Bosch, the Jeffreys Bay equivalent of Georgie W Bush, described the recent JBRA AGM as “’n gemors van ‘n gemors ….”, because the meeting started late and a politician spoke for too long, as though this were an unusual occurrence in South Africa these days, or in the past.  He then maunders on about Elza Van Lingen, complains because the meeting chair did NOT  rudely interrupt the guest speaker (as he no doubt would have done), then reports that the DA councillors walked out of the meeting (as though this was a new or unusual event). Finally, he gets his facts wrong about the make-up of the new committee. The JBRA is indeed fortunate to have a young and enthusiastic new chairman. Most, if not all, of the existing committee has agreed to stay on, myself included, and I believe a new person has offered their services.

Japie conveniently forgets that the AGM he organised the previous year failed to keep a register of attendees, failed to get key changes to the constitution passed because they were poorly thought through, and had a guest speaker who was later dismissed from the municipality under questionable circumstances. His entire committee, with 1 exception, were not available for re-election, leaving the task of forming a new committee entirely to yours truly.

Presumably Japie did not wait for the chairman’s report, read in absentia. So he did not report on the 10 fold increase in registered membership of the JBRA since his time on the committee. He had nothing to say about the new website, the Mobilitate issue reporting system, the new CPF functionality, the email discussion group, the regular newsletters and general meetings, the revival of FEKRRA, and the new legal dispute mechanism recently instituted. No, because the council employee opened the hall late, and the meeting went on a bit long, all he could see was “’n gemors”.

Ludwig Vorster, a former member of the committee who resigned without a word of explanation (at least to me), obviously prefers to be outside the tent spitting in. If he had stayed on the committee he could have helped check the hall booking 3 times in the prior week, he could have made an arrangement with a municipal official the week before to ensure at least 120 chairs were available, and he could have arrived at the hall early to ensure everything was on track. Instead, in his absence, the chairman did all these things, despite having other issues to deal with too.  If Ludwig had stayed on the committee, he could draft the angry letter to the municipality demanding to know why the facilities were not available as arranged.  Instead, someone else will need to undertake that task.  Like Japie, all Ludwig could see is what was wrong with the situation. As Churchill said, it takes some intelligence to see what is right.

Ludwig must also remember that when he sings “De La Rey”, many others will also sing of Biko and Hani.  I am deeply grateful that, despite all our problems in South Africa, we are still able to discuss most of the problems peacefully.

The JBRA committee and I put a lot of effort into achieving our 3 goals in this last year. We are now the biggest residents association in terms of registered members in Kouga. We have engaged frequently with the municipal officials, and achieved some successes. FEKRRA is back as a viable force in our local politics. 

Nevertheless, given the responses of these 2 bloggers, and the low level of involvement in the JBRA from most residents, I personally don’t think it was worth the effort.