KNYSNA NEWS - A hefty chunk of Knysna residents breathed a sigh of relief with the local government's announcement on Tuesday that all fire victims will be exempt from paying so-called punative availability fees for vacant stands the period 1 July 2017 to 30 June 2018.
Among the recommendations on the agenda by acting municipal manager Marlene Boyce at a special council meeting were that the “charging of vacant stand tariffs on all properties that were totally destroyed by the fire be waived for the 2017/2018 financial year”.
The announcement follows waves of dissent by fire victims displeased with the concession made by the city council under the auspices of previous mayor Eleonore Bouw-Spies after the Knysna wildfires last year: that fire victims would be exempt from paying rates and taxes. To the surprise of many fire victims they were however made responsible for paying availability fees at the higher rate for vacant erven.
'They took the whole hand'
"It was an utterly hollow concession,” said Knysna lawyer Coenraad de Beer who lost his property in Paradise. “They basically gave us a pinkie and took the whole hand. So excellent. We don’t have to pay rates, thank you so much,” he expressed with obvious irony. “But we were forced to pay availability fees which in many cases were equal or even much higher.”
De Beer added that it is commendable that new mayor Mark Willemse put paid to the frustration and confusion after such a short time in office. “It took him all of a few weeks to sort it out properly,” he said, “good for him.”
The intention of council has been to offer relief to the fire victims caught up in an unprecedented situation and not to penalise them, the agenda stated, “Even though the council waived the rates and correctly applied the tariff on service charges. The effect of applying the vacant stand tariff on the properties that were destroyed by fire has undone the rates waiver and caused anger and animosity from the people who were affected.”
A puzzle for many
For many, the very notion of availability remains a puzzle because it forces owners of vacant lots to pay the municipality for available services that they are not in effect making use of (see adjacent box). The purpose is apparently to encourage owners of empty plots to build on their land and curb renegade urban sprawl.
But even if this deduction can be justified as an incentive for people to build or occupy their empty land, many feel this should not be applicable to fire victims who never chose to own an empty plot of land in the first place.
As another victim, Gordon Rattay, whose family home burned down in the fire explained: “I can see their point of charging availability as incentive to encourage landowners to develop their properties and everything, but I never volunteered to be in this position, now did I?
“We’ve been fighting for this for over a year, thank you Mark Willemse!” exclaimed Sienna van Schoor of the Knysna Ratepayer’s association and OneKnysna.
A QUESTION OF AVAILABILITY
If you have never owned an open piece of land in an urban area, chances are you have never been confronted by the somewhat confusing concept of availability which, at a glance, constitutes a municipal service you pay for as long as you are not using it.
In practice it works thus: if you own an open plot of land, local governments argue that, because you could have been making use of services such as water, sanitation and refuse removal that would have been available to you had you had a house up on the property and living in it, you should be paying for those services anyway for the mere fact that they would have been available if you were already living there and using them.
Still confused?
If that is still too confusing, all you need to know is that if you own unoccupied land you are responsible for paying availability fees at a higher rate than for developed properties to the municipality as long as the services are, in all practicality, available to you. Which in effect, of course, means that as soon as you build on your property and start using those services for real because they are now literally available in a practical capacity, the privilege of paying availability for them immediately falls away. In other words, you can only pay availability as long as the services are not physically available to you.
If it all sounds a bit dangerously Pythonesque, it's because it is. The reasoning behind such apparent absurdity, they say, is to “encourage” landowners to build on or occupy their land. And it is a reasonably powerful exercise in encouragement because availability (or unavailability depending on your view), does not come cheap.
Great deal for fire victims?
Perhaps only as “cheap” as the deal the municipality offered fire victims last year when in an act of gushing goodwill, it vociferously pronounced that fire victims would be exempt from paying rates and taxes – which in the case of a burned out property is not very much at all or at least radically reduced. What they didn’t stress was that fire victims would immediately be eligible to pay availability bills at the higher rate for vacant stands which, as it happened, could add up to being much higher than the rates bill.
It is this seemingly Catch 22 situation that had fire victims up in arms until council's welcome announcement this week to exempt fire victims from availability fees for the 2017/2018 financial year. – Ed
Read a related article: Knysna fires' report update
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