Author: Ntobeko Mangqwengqwe

As part of the holiday safety awareness and welcoming programme, the Executive Mayor of George, Alderman Leon van Wyk, the members of the Executive Mayoral Committee, the Municipal Manager, and the Chairperson of the George Business Chamber welcomed tourists and visitors to the heart of the Garden Route, George, during a friendly Mayoral Roadblock that was held at the entrance to George, N9 on Wednesday, 14 December 2022.

The entourage consisted of Ald van Wyk, Dr Willie Cilliers Chairperson of the George Business Chamber, Executive Deputy Mayor Raybin Figland, Portfolio Councillor for Corporate Services and Human Resources Christiaan Neethling, Councillor Johan du Toit MPAC Chairperson, Portfolio Councillor for Community Safety Charlotte Clarke and the Municipal Manager Dr Michele Gratz who handed over holiday goody-bags to motorists.

Also present, were key stakeholders and role-players in tourism, safety and transport such as GO GEORGE represented by James Robb the Acting Public Transport Oversight Official, George Tourism (including Wilderness and Uniondale Tourism), Municipal Traffic Services, George Fire Services and Disaster Management, municipal Law Enforcement, Cluster CPF Chairperson, Rupert Pretorius and the South African Police Service (SAPS).  To add more excitement for our younger visitors, the ever-popular mascots Georgie from GO GEORGE and Daantjie Kat from the George Traffic Services were there for entertainment.

“Today we are conducting a holiday safety awareness programme to welcome visitors to George who will be spending their holidays here; we are accompanied by our community safety services and display of equipment, to demonstrate our readiness to receive and host our visitors and tourists and to ensure a safe, festive holiday for all,” said Ald van Wyk.

One of the highlights of this year’s Mayoral Friendly Roadblock was the participation of the George Business Chamber, represented by Chairperson Dr Willie Cilliers. “As the world of business, we warmly welcome our clients, and it is a great pleasure to be here to witness people coming on holiday. It is extremely important to us as businesses to get the people here and strengthen our partnership with the Municipality and other stakeholders during this annual event. We look forward to a bumper season and sustaining our business into the next year, 2023.

Municipal Manager Dr Gratz expressed her satisfaction with the success of the friendly Mayoral Roadblock. “I’m pleased with the success of the Mayoral Roadblock; this was certainly a great display of George’s readiness for the festive season. Our emergency personnel as well as all service delivery Departments are prepared to ensure maximum safety for visitors and locals and to ensure that our visitors enjoy their stay in a clean and well-run city where all services are working”.

PLEASE WATCH THE MARAL ROADBLOCK VIDEO: https://youtu.be/f9NXEcz6jek

For quick links to all the tourism information you may need in the greater George area, please follow the links below for quick access to Tourism Information, Safety for Visitors Information and Useful Municipal Contacts!

https://www.george.gov.za/…/tourism/safety-for-visitors/

https://www.george.gov.za/contact/

http://www.visitgeorge.co.za/

ENDS.

At the time of writing, we are experiencing welcome soft rains in George. Water restrictions have been implemented following lower-than-normal rains in 2022 which has resulted in the level of our Garden Route Dam dropping below 50% of its increased capacity.

The catchment area for our Dam is relatively small, dependent on the run-off from the Outeniqua Mountains. In 2020 and 2021, George’s annual rainfall was over 800mm and 1000mm respectively, compared to only 600mm up to November 2022. During normal average rainfall years, inflow to the Dam would therefore be sufficient for ten months when full.

Since December 2021, the daily usage of water has risen by 17-20% partly due to in-migration. With the aging of water infrastructure, it is also evident that there are more leakages and breakages throughout the water network. Over the past two years, the municipality has progressively allocated more financial and other resources to address pipe replacement and network management. We are adding more pressure release valves, meters, smarting metering devices and telemetry to the system to improve management of the system.

Over the past year, it has become noticeable that usage levels risen from 75% to 90% of the maximum treatment capacity, even exceeding 100% on some days, before allowing for losses through pipe bursts and regular maintenance needed at treatment plants. This has periodically placed enormous pressure on the water available in the reservoirs.

Readers will be aware that construction is currently underway on a 50% increase in treatment capacity, a R480 million project which is due for completion in 2025. In the meantime, we have begun to undertake refurbishment work on some of the treatment modules at the old water works to improve their efficiency. To cater for the increased usage of water, a temporary water treatment plant that can treat an extra 5 million litres of water (roughly 15% of daily usage) is being installed. This plant will be connected into the network by mid-December. In the past few weeks, in addition to the above projects, there have been unplanned interruptions in Eskom’s supply of electricity. This combination of interruptions caused our main reservoirs to be depleted to only having 2-3 hours’ water available at times. Even though communication alerts were sent out by the municipality they were largely ignored.

The water restrictions have accordingly been introduced to appeal to consumers to understand that our water resources are limited due to lower rainfall. Water is essential for the existence of earth’s inhabitants. Our appeal is therefore that each household or business should reduce usage by 15% to ensure that we can stretch our available water until we receive sufficient rain to replenish the water stored in the Dam.

Ald L van Wyk

Executive Mayor of George

George Municipality is the first electricity provider in the country to pilot freely licensed software that automates the reading, processing, and billing of electricity smart meter data. The wheeling pilot that was approved by Council and offered limited wheeling as a service is open to everyone who wants to wheel energy.

The first wheeling transaction took place in May 2022 at George Municipality, following the signing of the use-of-system agreements in July 2021. The billing process has for many years been done manually, requiring extensive time for verification and preparation of bills once the data was retrieved from the meters.

“The need for this freely licensed software pilot became evident when we considered the scaling of wheeling and renewable energy on the George Municipality’s electricity grid. The manual billing process was one of the main challenges and resolving this meant reducing reliance and pressure on key human resources, reducing potential errors that could occur in the billing process. Engagement with Open Access Energy on showcasing their software that they license for free, has assisted in addressing the challenge for us and we are now piloting the automation of our metering and billing services.” said Mr Bongani Mandla, the director of electrotechnical services at George Municipality.

Wheeling is the delivery of electricity generated by a private operator in one location to a buyer or off-taker in another location via a third-party network (Utility or Municipality).

According to Gerjo Hoffman, Chief-Executive-Officer and co-founder of Open Access Energy, the software company aims to boost the use of renewable energy by simplifying wheeling. “Our products aim to automate wheeling and serve the needs of anyone that wants to wheel energy. Our initial focus is South Africa, but our future aspiration is to offer solutions in all emerging markets globally,” says Hoffman.

Open Access Energy currently has two products in the market. Access Energy is a freely licensed software solution that reads smart meters, stores the meter data in a meter data sharing system, and exposes that data to municipalities. The software allows the Municipality to create and load their electricity tariffs and then apply them to a bill. The final bill is sent to the municipalities Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, which then sends the bill to the end customer.

Open Access Energy’s second product is called EnergyPro. This Software as a Service (SaaS) solution focuses on IPPs and Energy traders and assists wheelers to wheel to multiple customers. “Our clients are renewable energy producers and energy traders who want to sell their energy to customers all over South Africa,” says Hoffman.

“Mr Bongani Mandla highlighted that the current George Municipality wheeling pilot consists of trade between one generator and four off-takers through Enpower Trading (a NERSA licensed Energy Trader) and this entire process has now been automated using Open Access Energy’s software. The Municipality is working on further improvements to its wheeling projects and to incentivise the private sector (both generators and off-takers) to participate in this program. These include creating a platform for customers to view their accounts and access their consumption and billing data in real-time, forming various committees to expedite the process of standardising the use-of-system contracts as well as moving from the 30-minute reconciliation to a Time-of-Use reconciliation.

“It is essential to thank our Engineering Services team under the leadership of Mr Kobus Wilken and Mr Derek Baxter for their determination in driving this process, as well as Open Access Energy leadership for piloting this freely licensed software with George Municipality. We will continuously keep pushing hard to provide the people of George an improved electricity service,” said Mr Bongani Mandla

ENDS.

The Executive Mayor of George, Ald Leon van Wyk recently visited Emmaüs, a protective work centre for disabled adults to show appreciation for the valuable work that is being done by the centre. Mayor van Wyk visited the centre on Friday, 2 December 2022, a day before the organisation’s annual X-mas market.

According to Emmaüs, the X-mas market was a huge success. “The first Emmaüs Bazaar after Covid-19 was a huge and very successful event, and we would like to thank the Community for their excellent support.  Despite load-shedding and bad weather we still managed to host a very big fundraising event with a lovely atmosphere.  We could see that the community of George was hungry for a good old-fashioned Emmaüs get-together since 2019,” said Emmaus

We wish to thank the Executive Mayor, Ald Leon van Wyk and Municipal Manager, Dr Michele Gratz for their visit to our Centre. Also, a very big thank you to all our donors and volunteers, without their contributions and help our bazaar would not have been such a huge success.

Mayor van Wyk wishes to encourage the public, businesses, and donors to continue supporting Emmaüs as they have recently lost about 40% of their funding. This organisation is doing an amazing job and is relying heavily on public support. Emmaus can only fulfil its vision of providing adult disabled persons with optimal protection and care if the community continues to support them.

Emmaüs provides the adult disabled with accommodation, food, and therapeutic job opportunities irrespective of race, culture, sex, or religious beliefs. About 85 beneficiaries receive transport and meals daily.

Emmaüs is located at 6 Memorium Street, George, the head of the centre, Mrs. Elsabee Badenhorst can be reached on admin@emmausgeorge.co.za or 044 873 4196.

ENDS.

The Executive Mayor of George, Alderman Leon van Wyk, accompanied by Councillors Marlene Barnardt, the Chief Whip, Erika Brown councillor for Ward 3 and Donovan Gultig, councillor for Ward 18 visited the George Night Shelter on Friday, 2 December 2022. This is part of a series of visits the Executive Mayor and his entourage visited to appreciate and show support for social and community development programmes and activities in the City of George.

There are about 120 people in the night shelter every evening. The night shelter opens its doors to the homeless for R25 an evening which includes a cooked meal and breakfast. There is a permanent social worker based at the shelter who assists the homeless to apply for their IDs, helps them create CVs and assists them in applying for work. The George Night Shelter enjoys the support of both the George Municipality and the Department of Social Development (DSD), as well as donations from the community and businesses.

The assistant manager, Mr Chris Classen, gave the mayor and his delegation a tour of the shelter and spoke about their zero tolerance when it comes to the consumption of any substances. He said that occupants are expected to leave the shelter at 08h00 and return by 15h00, upon their return they are tested with a breathalyser. He also mentioned that the social worker based at the shelter tries to reunite occupants with their families. The delegation was also shown an artwork from a woman who lives in the night shelter, Tanja Roux who is pleased to share her work.

“I am highly grateful for the work being done at this night shelter. We have a homelessness problem in our town. Our service industry who are lending a helping hand should be commended for their work, the social workers, people like Mr Classen – you help make our town better with the selfless work you do,” said Alderman van Wyk.

ENDS.

With less than a month to Christmas, a period that is characterised by the exchange of gifts, care and family time, the Executive Mayor of George, Alderman Leon van Wyk, and Councillor Brendon Adams, the Portfolio Councillor for Community Services, Social Development, Libraries and Sport went out to the townships of George on Wednesday, 7 December 2022 and handed over Gas stoves to eight (8) City’s nutritional centres, formerly known as ‘soup kitchens.

“Today we were in Conville, Pacaltsdorp, Thembalethu, Rosemore and Maraiskamp. I’m sure that many children in these areas rely on a hearty cup of soup as their only meal of the day. I would like to thank these women for the wonderful work that they do in our communities,” said Mayor van Wyk.

Dina Witbooi serves 120 – 130 people a day, four times a week
Mayor van Wyk and Portfolio Councillor Adam’s first stop was at Dina Witbooi’s soup kitchen on Cain Road, Rosedale. Ms Witbooi serves 120 – 130 people a day four times a week. Handing over the stove to Witbooi, Mayor van Wyk said: “I am very happy that I had the opportunity to hand over this stove to Ms Dina to assist her in the noble work that she is doing for her community. I commend every soup kitchen for their amazing work and service.”

Witbooi could not contain her excitement and appreciation of receiving the new stove the Municipality bequeath to her. Reacting to the Executive Mayor, Ms Witbooi happily bragged to the Mayor that she will be making biryani on her new stove.

Rosina Gordon has been feeding her community for 30 years
The second stop was Ms Rosina Gordon in Jacaranda Street Pacaltsdorp. Ms Gordon told Mayor van Wyk and Cllr Adams that she has been feeding her community for 30 years and that she will be 70 years old in a little over a year.

She also indicated that they need more donations, as there is a genuine need for soup kitchens and feeding schemes in the area. “The nutritional value of these foods needs attention as well and I try my best with what I get,” Gordon said.

On the flip side, Gordon, proudly mentioned that she hosts a Christmas party for residents every year where she feeds those in need. Last year she fed over 300 people.

As Mayor van Wyk and Cllr. Adams took a tour of her home, and Ms Gordon informed them that her husband built a kitchen space for the work that she does with her soup kitchen. Upon receipt of her stove, she expressed gratitude for the stove and said that they will make space for her new stove. Gordon feeds between 250 – 300 people twice a week (Monday & Thursday).

Mayor van Wyk commended Gordon for her work and reiterated that she is a hero of her community ensuring that people, young and old, are fed. She even made sandwiches for her visitors and told Mayor that she refused to have anyone leave her home without having something to eat and that the Mayor and Cllr Adams would not be an exception.

Ms Stella Lottering in Blanco feeds 85 people three times a week
The last stop on the Mayor’s tour was to Ms Stella Lottering in Blanco. She feeds 85 people three times a week.

“Today I have met a few heroes in our society. I have so much admiration and appreciation for the work that all these amazing women do for their communities. These stoves will go a long way in aiding them in their pursuit.” Mayor van Wyk concluded.

Ms Stella thanked Mayor van Wyk and Cllr Adams and said that they will never fully understand how much this means to her. She thanked the municipality for this contribution. People wanting to support the nutritional centres can contact 044 802 2000.

ENDS.