Ratepayers blindsided

DEAR SIR — On April 9 at 5pm I agreed to attend a meeting with my local councillor and the mayor of Johannesburg at 8.30am the next morning as a representative of my community.

As a sign of good time management the meeting, which apparently had been arranged only two days before, started at 10am. Not a good start for one who had been away for 10 days before that and had rearranged his day to fit the meeting in.

The meeting turned out to be a mayoral stakeholder engagement in our region. The only trouble was most people present were employees and not ratepayers. They were too busy running businesses or making money to get there at such short notice.

The meeting was a great example of poor planning, bad equipment, with poor presentations delivered over a poor sound system. No agenda had been provided beforehand and the attendant “stakeholders” were in the dark as to why they were there and what was going to happen. The agendas were handed out as the meeting started.

In essence, the meeting was to inform us of the new approach being taken to planning in the Johannesburg metro and not to hear our complaints about poor service delivery. Apparently Johannesburg is to launch communitybased planning and we have been selected as the pilot region.

This is a very worrying development. The objective is to get ward-level input into the planning process, which will only start in November for the next financial year.

As I see it, this is an attempt to fool the ratepayers into thinking they have contributed to the plans.