Building plans left to rot
Original documents found scattered around basement including in toilets
WANT an original copy of your house or building plans?
You might have to wander into the basement of the Metro Civic Centre into the toilets to find them.
Architect Andy Kollenberg said she was shocked to see piles of plans scattered all over the floors including inside the toilets.
She went into the development planning department at the Metro Centre to get some plans for a building she was working on and was told they were not on file.
“I asked a young lady sitting playing on her phone what I should do and she said they were in the basement.
“She took me down and I was shocked at what I found. It was impossible to find anything,” she said.
Kollenberg said with no available plans, old buildings have to be resubmitted as new ones which cost the clients money.
City of Joburg development planning spokesperson Poppy Louw said the plans captured in the photographs were recently received from all seven regional offices.
“The plans are completed applications, for which occupancy certificates have already been issued and are ready to be archived.
“The regional offices do not have any physical space available to store these files, hence they were brought to the Metro Centre for archiving.
“Due to the volume of applications that need to be archived, it is not possible for the present staff complement to store these files during core working hours,” she said.
The department has, therefore, employed the services of 12 interns within the last month to resolve the archiving challenge faced by the department.
“Furthermore, there is very limited physical space within the Metro Centre at Braamfontein to store all the completed files.
“The department recently identified and secured space at the B basement to store these files in a orderly manner to make retrieval easy,” she added.
Kollenberg, however, denies that the plans have been captured electronically.
“If that was the case, I could have found mine,” she said.
Another frustrated draughtsman Wille van Wyk said he was tired of continually going into the offices only to be told they are off-line.
“It is costing me time and money going backwards and forwards. For weeks we were unable to access plans from our offices and were forced to go in to the Metro Centre.
“Then, when we are given paper copies, they have big black lines through them, making them virtually unreadable because their equipment is so old. And to add insult to injury, we are made to pay between R40 and R80 per copy,” he said.