Council Report: Extraordinary Meeting 23 October 2024

Council Report: Extraordinary meeting 23 October 2024

Council jubilantly agrees on increasing upper limits of remuneration for themselves, while admitting the City is not collecting enough to fund the budget.

The extraordinary meeting of the City of Johannesburg council had to be held online due to the chamber and Braamfontein being without water.

The Executive Mayor Dada Morero addressed the water crises in a direct speech to council. Having met with Joburg Water (JW), Rand Water (RW) and the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) the Mayor acknowledged that there are significant issues with water supply to the City. The municipality is exceeding its allocated bulk supply from RW and the storage reserves of RW have been depleted to 35% rather than the standard 60% while the City’s infrastructure has 9 hours of storage instead of the required 24 hrs of supply storage which is a very unstable system. Morero tabled that interventions such as repairing leaking reservoirs and towers alongside improving bylaw enforcement such as removing illegal connections must be done with urgency. The City will also be revising the conservation and demand strategy to improve response times to pipe bursts from 48 hours to 24 hours.

The extraordinary meeting was required to table the COJ MFMA in-year financial report for the period ended 31 July 2024. The report shows that the City is under collecting on revenue. At the same point in 2023, COJ was achieving a revenue collection rate of 86.7% versus a target of 87.3%, however this year we are under collecting by almost 10% by the end of July 2024 to the tune of almost R1bn a month. The budget requires a revenue collection of 94.7% while the City is collecting at 83.2%. This is an average. Electricity revenue collection is high at almost 99% while water is incredibly poor at only 65.4% of billed supply. 2023 debt impairment on water was R8bn. COJ is loosing R600m a month in billing. The increases in tariffs have severely impacted on already struggling households according to council resulting in an increased debtors book of residents who cannot afford services. Seven of the thirteen entities of the COJ are overdrawn. Due to poor income only 1% of Capex spending has been made as the funds are not available to fund projects. The City is still struggling to bring timeous reports to council to be proactive on these financial disclosures and is still, despite years of warnings, mSCOA non-compliant.

The final item on the agenda was the increase of the upper limits of what the council can be paid. Despite the financial disclosure showing the City was unable to spend on projects and the falling collection rates, the motion was enthusiastically adopted. The EFF and FFP opposed the increase, the DA abstained but support from the ANC and Action SA carried the proposal. Council members in the COJ approved to be paid according to the tables below:

Upper limits of the annual total remuneration packages of part-time councillors are  as follows: