The city of Cape Town is losing valuable revenue because the reading of water meters and collection of debt are being hampered by critical vacancies in the utilities and finance directorates.
Democratic Alliance councillor Beverly Cortje-Alcock said she was concerned that there was massive underspending on staff recruitment.
The city budgeted R774-million on the 2008/09 labour budget for vacancies, but there were more than 700 critical vacancies in the electricity department, which was struggling to reach a meter-reading rate of more than 80 percent.
Guy Laurie of the city's electricity department told the finance portfolio committee on Monday that no more than 79 percent of the city's electricity meters could be read in September. The number of read meters in August was no more than 77 percent.
There are 169 000 conventional electricity meters of which more than half are read by contractors.
He said the department needed to fill its vacancies so meters could be read, serviced and maintained.
Finance portfolio committee chairperson Ian Iversen said he was concerned that more meters were not being read. "No wonder the accounts are in such a mess."
Utility portfolio committee chairperson Jan Burger said that most of the work was being outsourced, but the city council did not have enough supervisors on site to check that work was being done.
Meanwhile, staff shortages have also affected service delivery in the city's finance department.
0 comments:
Post a Comment