Outcry over property valuation inspection
Some residents give BCM’s R22m exercise thumbs-down
BUFFALO City Metro has embarked on another general valuation (GV) of properties – and this time the metro has promised that all properties will be physically inspected.
The first GV was conducted in 2009 with the second in 2013. BCM residents have been informed via their account notices, that property valuers and data collectors would visit properties to update property information from January to July 2017.
“They will identify themselves by means of ID cards and letters of delegation,” the notice read.
BCM spokesman Sibusiso Cindi told the Saturday Dispatch yesterday that BCM had budgeted about R22-million for GV this year.
“The metro plans to do additional things this time around, for example, the previous GV was done in house, in terms of Section 45 of the Municipal Property Rates Act, and physical inspection was not done on all properties.
“However in the GV 2017, all properties will be visited and data collected on site,” said Cindi. However not everyone has received the news of the GV well.
A Dispatch reader who identified himself as Brian in a letter to the editor this week said the idea was “a waste of taxpayers’ money”.
“Just a few years ago, they wasted millions of ratepayers’ money on these people, who conducted valuations of our properties.
“Surely, whoever is behind these arrangements to reevaluate our properties, must have their heads read,” Brian wrote. He said that BCM needed only to go to their own town planning department and ask for a print of all the plans that were passed from the last evaluations until now “and re-evaluate only those properties, and adjust those people’s accounts accordingly”.