Concern over poor state of city’s parks

OPPOSITION parties in ethekwini Municipality have asked the parks, recreation and cemetery department to come up with plans to address the backlog in the maintenance of its facilities. Many of the city’s parks, beaches and cemeteries were in bad condition due to lack of maintenance.

The municipality informed residents that the parks and recreation department was operating with reduced staff complement during Level 3 lockdown as a result of compliance with Covid-19 regulations.

Nicole Graham, DA Caucus leader, said this was one of the issues which have been constantly raised at the task team meeting. She said the main issue was that most of the parks services were not considered as essential.

“We did a request on how we can have the parks and recreation staff considered as essential workers after we saw our parks and beaches getting worse. We are concerned this is becoming a security risk in places where you have overgrown bushes, and we have been having a lot of complaints about the state of the beachfront.

“The city has been having problems with phasing in staff and getting them correctly trained with proper personal protective wear. There have been problems in the city where we have overgrown verges, and it’s going to take significant effort and proper plans to get back to a normal state.”

This week, the DA also inspected the city’s swimming pools where it alleged that more than 50 public pools in Durban have turned green and stand at risk of having to be drained because the city had run out of chlorine.

It said the city has no contract in place to secure chlorine – even before the country went on lockdown at the end of March.