Durban - The Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry has slammed the eThekwini Municipality for threatening R10 000 fines for all businesses which failed to reduce their water consumption by 15%.
Chamber vice-president Mike Jackson was responding to a city presentation during a drought-relief business indaba last week.
In February the city imposed 15% water restrictions after a directive by the national Department of Water and Sanitation, as a measure to mitigate the gripping drought.
At the time, the city said homes and businesses failing to comply would be issued with written warnings and subsequently fined.
eThekwini water by-laws stipulate that domestic consumers could be charged R500, while R10 000 was the fine for large businesses.
Jackson said the chamber didn’t believe that commercial and big businesses should “suddenly be slapped.. just because they couldn’t save 15% of their water”.
He said some would battle to meet the 15% reduction due to the nature of their businesses.
“Some of those big businesses may not be engaged in wasteful water practices, it may just be the nature of their business,” he said.
“We noticed in the presentation that the city asked for restrictions of 15% and in April there were 7.5% savings,” he said.
“From the chamber, we want to say that we don’t believe commercial, big businesses should suddenly be slapped with a R10 000 fine just because they couldn’t save 15% of their water.”
There should be “constructive dialogues with the big businesses prior to being slapped with the fines every month”.
Instead of rushing to issue fines to business, the city should intensify efforts to curb wasteful expenditure highlighted in the city’s annual report for last year.
“We’d also like to reiterate the 40% unbilled water from last year’s city annual report; we just ask that more attention and resources be given into looking at that,” he said.
City water operations senior manager Ashan Nandlal told Jackson that the penalties had been approved by council.
He said the municipality had embarked on various water-saving campaigns. The campaigns targeted schools, councillors, community meetings etc.
“We are also looking, via our customer services department, at identifying consumers with the highest consumption.
“On a regular basis we extract reports of the top 150 consumers with the highest consumption and deal with them directly, individually,” he said.
The Mercury