Mr Theo van Vuuren, acting municipal manager said the municipality managed to pay the full main and sub accounts of R86-million and R19-million respectively for the month.
The next payment is due in the middle of August for the July account and on August 31 the municipality has to cough up R5 million on capital.
The total arrears still stands at R488 million to be repaid over the next 21months.
“I want to thank everybody who have paid their accounts on time and want to encourage all to address their arrears and accounts as we will be facing an even steeper hurdle in the next month where we are also to start paying capital again,” Van Vuuren said.
Various attempts to encourage institutions such as schools to make arrangements to pay their current accounts arrears have fallen on deaf ears.
“We have no option but to start disconnecting schools and churches that are ignoring these requests. This will start this week,” Van Vuuren said.
In the interim the overloading of substations because of illegal connections is still a huge headache.
According to Van Vuuren various areas in the western suburbs are experiencing problems due to the overloading of substations.
“The problem is that in these cases all citizens are being penalised, firstly as a result of power outages and secondly the inability to recover costs from users and stress on our finances. We have lost many transformers because of this and other acts of theft,” he said.
“At this stage we cannot replace all transformers as these need to be purchased and that takes time and money. I am becoming more reluctant to keep on replacing transformers immediately in areas where transformers are burned out because of illegal overloading.”
At an Operation Hlasela meeting last week, the Municipal Executive Leadership also guided that in these areas it is expected that the community should start taking own responsibility and improve the situation of payment and censoring their fellow community members who are illegally using electricity before transformers are replaced.
Each transformer that is replaced costs up to R300 000 whilst in some of the areas where they burn out constantly payment for electricity is as low as 10%. A great example is that of Rietspruit where the deadline and grace period to correct accounts was on July 15.
If Rietspruit’s position has not improved significantly, the municipality will start introducing municipal load shedding to minimise the electricity losses until everyone starts taking responsibility for their utilisation.
Residents in Rietspruit argue that the mines in that area must pay on behalf of the residents.
“This is fraud and should not prevent the municipality from recovering costs from the people actually utilising the electricity,” Van Vuuren said sternly.
The Municipal Executive Leadership also took the decision in principle that the municipality will start introducing load shedding in areas where payment rates are low in direct relationship to the payment rate. As an example, if the payment rate is 10% the municipality will provide electricity for 10% of the time.
“I do appreciate those coming in to make arrangements to pay arrears. Please note however that although we will go out of our way to be lenient and to consider ways to accommodate you, any arrangement made must be realistic. To offer R300 per month on arrears of R40 000 is not realistic.
To expect that we write everything or the bulk of outstanding money off, are neither realistic nor is it fair to your fellow community member who have paid their accounts. It is a choice how you want to spend your money and if the choice is to spend it on other things, then use less electricity. You cannot expect your neighbours to fund your spending habits. However, we will try to assist in a fair and humane manner. There are many cases where the merit of the case will allow us to be accommodative. Please come in and talk to the managers or even myself if there are reasons why we should consider a reduction in the outstanding amounts.”
