‘Noisy’ steel firm given notice to leave
Company had been occupying municipal land ‘illegally’
EKURHULENI Municipality has given a steel manufacturing company marching orders for allegedly occupying land illegally and also causing unbearable noise for residents who live in the vicinity.
Cochrane Steel, the multinational company based in Spartan, has been given three-weeks notice by the metro to vacate the municipal land it is believed to have illegally occupied for roughly three years.
The company, which produces fencing such as the popular Clear Vu brand, has been embroiled in a tussle since 2014 with residents who live around its Fitter and Kelvin roads premises.
Residents complained that Cochrane Steel has taken over the municipal land and road on Fitter and Kelvin roads for the storage of its inventory, equipment and other assets.
A caretaker of the Rhodesfield Terrace View complex on Kelvin Road said she started receiving complaints from her residents about noise levels at night caused by the company’s workers, who she said sometimes worked as late as midnight.
“People cannot sleep at night because of the noise. The forklifts ride up and down the street, the workers make the same noise at night as they do during the day. They have no consideration for the people who live here,” the caretaker, who asked to remain anonymous, said.
“We have schoolchildren who use Kelvin Road when they come home in the afternoons, and here are these big, bulking trucks driving down the road – which has been damaged.”
On Monday, Ward 17 councillor Simon Lapping and City Planning MMC Masele Madihlaba visited the area with a large delegation of senior officials, including legal compliance and municipal courts officials and law enforcement agencies, to deliver a notice compelling the company to clear all its assets off municipal property within three weeks.
Madihlaba chastised the company’s founding chief executive, Bruce Cochrane, for illegally occupying municipal land, telling him he had made the community’s lives unbearable.
“This damage, from what I can see, probably runs into millions of rand because this road is damaged, the curves are gone and the pavement is also collapsing.
“Residents are complaining – some of them say they have been involved in accidents,” Madihlaba told Cochrane.
Cochrane acknowledged the city’s notice and promised to comply with it fully, adding that his company would cover the costs of infrastructure damage caused by them.
“So we do apologise for this problem but we are not walking away from it – we are trying to fix it as urgently as we can,” Cochrane said.
He also told The Star that the reason his company occupied municipal land was because the business had grown over the last three years.
“We’re busy promoting our products internationally, we’ve been very successful at it and we’ve achieved a huge amount of export business and foreign currency.
“This has caught us off guard as we have to supply customers, and our workforce has grown from 200 employees a few years ago to around 1 000 currently,” Cochrane said, adding that they’ve purchased 60 000 square metres of land at Lords View Industrial Park in Midrand.
Asked why he didn’t alert the community and the city of these plans, Cochrane said he did consult the community, including the caretaker of the complex who understood the situation, and has an application pending with the city to purchase their land and close the road.
However, the caretaker refuted Cochrane’s claims, saying she only spoke to him once over the phone and never came to an agreement with him.
The Star has seen e-mail correspondence dated October 18 2016 between Cochrane and the city’s property officer, Virgil Masuaby, where Masuaby writes: “Just informing you that (your application) was approved at (the Mayoral) Cluster yesterday and will serve at next cluster meeting which is the final committee... will get a approval!!![Sic]”
Lapping denied these claims, saying he “never sat on any agenda last year or this year”.
Masuaby told The Star he sent the e-mails not for anything sinister but to “reassure a valuable client like Mr Cochrane” that all was on track with his application.
Madihlaba refused to entertain Cochrane’s pleas that an application was being processed, saying: “This is the municipality’s property. Despite the fact that you have made an application to buy or lease a certain portion of the land, that transaction has not being processed.”
@khayakoko88
The damage probably runs into millions