Cape Town Mayor defends budget, tariffs again in response to AfriForum's legal challenge

The City of Cape Town Mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, has again come to the defence of the City of Cape Town’s budget and tariffs, in court papers filed in response to AfriForum’s legal challenge against the fixed tariffs.

AfriForum seeks to have the budget declared invalid until the end of the 2025/2026 financial year, 30 June 2026, “to allow the City to rectify the defects”.

An affidavit by AfriForum’s West Coast district coordinator Jurie Ferreira, said that at the heart of their application is the City's imposition of a tariff and charges, and AfriForum's contention that the City does not have the power to use the value of property to do so.

“At this early point, AfriForum must say that this application is not about undermining or detracting from all the good things that the City does right. In AfriForum's respectful view, the City is one of a small number of municipalities that generally does the right things, and does them in the right way.

“The City and AfriForum obviously also have differing views, and this is one of the few instances where AfriForum and the City do not agree. Despite the continued spirit of cooperation between the City and AfriForum, the public interest compels AfriForum to approach the Honourable Court for relief,” Ferreira said.

Hill-Lewis has hit back in the City’s answering affidavit, where he starts off explaining that they are facing a similar challenge brought by the South African Property Owners' Association ("SAPOA"), and that when AfriForum’s application was launched, he had already deposed to an answering affidavit in the SAPOA matter.

“The deponent in this matter has expressly indicated that the applicant had no regard to my affidavit in the SAPOA matter for purposes of this application, despite being in communication with each other in the lead up to the launch of these applications.”

He said that he has been advised that the two applications will be heard together by the same court, but are not consolidated and, as such, remain separate applications.

He added that given the similarities in the challenges brought, “there is a considerable overlap in the information and what is set out in the SAPOA application”.

He states, “The City contends that the applicant's case is legally unsound based on the reasons set out in this affidavit. The three fixed tariffs as reflected in the Budget are lawful, reasonable and rational.

“The City does not contend that its determination of the fixed tariffs in the Budget, and the methodology applied to do so, is the only way to do so, but the City does assert that the path it has chosen in the Budget is lawful, reasonable and rational, and for these reasons the Budget is also constitutionally compliant,” Hill-Lewis said.

“If this threshold is reached, then this application should fail.”

Hill-Lewis added that AfriForum is “asking this court to usurp the City's constitutional and legislative powers to determine how the costs for water, sanitation and cleaning should be recovered, beyond what the court is lawfully permitted to do”.

He added that the City's response on this is that it elected to recover the City-wide cleaning costs from sundry tariffs calculated with reference to property value bands.

“The City-wide cleaning costs for residential property owners were not calculated into the rates levied on property owners, and if they were to be included in rates, then the rates to be paid would increase.

“The result thereof would be... that save in four disparate categories, the property-owner will pay more for the City-wide cleaning service as a rate, than they do as a City-wide cleaning charge and the decision to levy it as a sundry tariff was entirely rational.”

The matter is expected to be heard in December in the Western Cape High Court.

In their SAPOA matter, the City had explained that SAPOA got their way to have the budget declared unconstitutional, the City would have a shortfall an amount of R4,2bn “if all three fixed tariffs are set aside”.

“The ‘best case scenario’ is a shortfall of R1,912,533,115, if fixed tariffs based on property value bands only are set aside. In other words, the non-domestic customers' contribution remains in force, as it is not challenged, the tariffs were decided and calibrated consequently on this intensive process,” he said.

theolin.tembo@inl.co.za