Winston Park speed humps become legal matter

WINSTON Park residents have laid numerous complaints with their ward councillor, Rick Crouch, regarding the implementation of speed humps on Jan Smuts Avenue. Crouch said the eThekwini Municipality does an annual review of all roads in the municipality and the category five roads that fall within the top 25 in accidents get priority with regard to traffic calming.

“Jan Smuts Avenue in Winston Park fell within that top 25. When I queried this with eThekwini Transport Authority (ETA) they confirmed that the year used for the survey was 2013 and that there were nine accidents on the road and two were with injuries.

“A group of residents have made a claim that Jan Smuts Avenue has been wrongly classified as a class five road and in fact should be classified as a class four road,” Crouch said.

Crouch said a letter from Hillcrest law firm, Lister and Co, was sent to the municipality: “As a result of this letter the matter is now being handled by the municipality’s legal department, so the line department will no longer be engaging with me or residents on the matter. As per council policy all communication must now be made via the legal department.

“Also as a result of the lawyer’s letter, all work on the speed humps has been stopped with immediate effect.

“I have been inundated with emails and phone calls from residents both wanting the speed humps and not wanting them. Some residents that don’t want the speed humps have demanded that I, as the ward councillor, immediately put a stop to the project. They then get angry when I say that I cannot and if I attempted to do that I would be in violation of both the Act and the councillor code of conduct, in particular Section 11 of the councillor code of conduct which states; A councillor may not, interfere in the management or administration of any department of the municipal

council. (b) give or purport to give any instruction to any employee of the council. (c) obstruct or attempt to obstruct the implementation of any decision of the council or a committee by and employee of the council,” he said.

He added that all he could do as a councillor is to ask questions, which is what he said he’s done numerous times in this case.

“Residents of eThekwini must be more involved in the running of the city, these policies come up for review from time to time and that is where residents should have their voice heard if they do not like something in a policy or by-law, trying to fight the implementation of the policy after the fact is almost impossible.

“When the traffic calming policy came up for review a number of months ago, I requested input from the community, and as with every other policy I received zero input, thereby assuming that the residents of Ward 10 were happy with the policy,” he concluded.