Municipality ‘mum’ on parking meters

FOR REASONS only known to itself, AbaQuluis Municipality refuses to throw light on the mystery that surrounds the sudden and unexplained removal of the parking meters in town. The meters were removed from the CBD over the weekend at the end of November.
All that remains to tell of their presence over the past three years, are the base plates still on the pavements, which now constitute a very real danger to pedestrians who don’t look where they are going. Someone IS going to trip over a base plate and is going to be injured.
The contract with company who erected and managed the meters, expired at the end of March 2013. Does this mean that anyone who continued to put money in a meter to park, was being, in effect, conned, in that the company had no right after March to collect a parking fee? Does that mean that any parking fine issued by the municipality after March, was irregular in that the restrictions were not validated by the expired contract?
The municipality will not tell us anything.
We asked the municipality these questions (twice): 1. In the 36 months of the contract, please confirm that no monies were paid to the municipality in terms of the contract. 2. If true, why was this lapse tolerated, and who authorized the continual collection of monies from the public without benefit to the municipality? 3. Do the meters now, again in terms of the contract, belong to the municipality? 4. If the meters do now belong to the municipality, what is to become of them? 5. What plans does the municipality now have to control parking in the CBD? The municipality simply ignored our request for information. The request was sent to the media liaison officer, the office of the Mayor, the office of the Municipal Manager and the records department who would have given the request a docuument number and forwarded the reqest to the relevant office.
No response was received.