Cape Town - After more than 30 years as a community facility, the Good Hope Centre will now officially be closed for public use.
Following months of opposition to the plan, a heated debate in the Cape Town city council on Thursday sealed the deal.
The majority DA caucus voted in favour of turning the facility into a film studio for the next two years and 11 months.
Opposition parties fought tooth and nail to get the council to change its mind, banding together to vote against its closure.
The National Party SA’s Achmat Williams said the Good Hope Centre was built with the intention of benefiting the community.
It was not the only city facility running at a loss, he said.
The ANC’s Majidie Abrahams accused the city council of deliberately allowing its public venues to become rundown and to fall into a state of disrepair.
The city council, he said, was abdicating its responsibility of maintaining public facilities.
The Al Jama-ah’s Ganief Hendricks said closing the Good Hope Centre for public use was akin to the city council privatising its assets.
The UDM’s Malcolm Taylor said the facility had become a part of people’s cultural identity and that the city council was slowly selling off assets intended to benefit the public.
“The community is being dispossessed,” he said.
The city council expects to earn R250 000 per month from leasing the venue to a film company.
It has been leasing the facility since last July on a short-term basis to the film industry, extending the lease until the end of last month.
The film industry will now be invited to submit their offers by way of a public tender process.
During the debate, the DA’s Junade Hoosain said the city council had gone “above and beyond” to accommodate events like Sactwu’s Spring Queen Festival and the Cape Malay choirs at other venues.
Sactwu, it said, was “quite happy” to host its event at the Athlone Stadium last year.
“I don’t see what the hype is about,” said Hoosain.
Mayoral committee member for economic development Garreth Bloor said moving the events to other venues had a positive effect – generating more revenue for the organisers and allowing more people to attend them than what the Good Hope Centre could accommodate.
He said the council’s relationship with organisations who had previously used the venue, was “fantastic”.
Bloor said it was “disingenuous” of opposition parties to deny the city council revenue and job creation.
Although more than 100 events were held at the facility during the 2014/15 financial year, revenue targets had not been met, earning only 42 percent of its budgeted revenue.
The city council estimates that the cost of repairs to the centre to be R16m, while income was less than R3m a year.
Cape Argus