Johannesburg - New councils, new councillors, a new financial year... but what finances will the new teams take over?
When they open the books, those new councillors will find that their predecessors spent an awful lot of money in the last few months of their rule and were very kind to their constituents in the run-up to the local government elections by writing off billions of rand in debt.
In Gauteng, the new councillors take over councils that together spent R6 billion more than their revenue during April to June, the last quarter of the municipal financial year. A chunk of that quarter's spending was writing off R2.6bn in irrecoverable debt.
That left them jointly with a financial year-end deficit on the operating budget of about R860 million, which was much worse than the joint surplus of more than R4bn the year before.
This is what is reflected in the quarterly reports on the state of the municipal budgets, the regular reports in terms of section 71 of the Municipal Financial Management Act. The Gauteng report was published earlier this month.
Together the Gauteng municipalities budgeted for operating revenue of R113bn for 2015/16 and operating expenditure of R112bn.
But by the end of June - the end of the financial year - they had together raised revenue of only R106.5bn and had spent R107bn.
The revenue was less than expected, because electricity revenue was budgeted at R42bn but ended up as R38bn, while water revenue was budgeted at R14.4bn but ended up as R13.8bn.
The lower electricity and water sales helped with the municipalities' expenditure, as they spent less on bulk purchases of these: they had budgeted for these to cost R39.6bn but ended up spending R37.3bn.
The big extra expense was debt impairment, and that was particularly so during April to June. This is debt that was written off as irrecoverable.
Debt impairment was budgeted at R5.8bn for the year but shot up to nearly R7bn.
About 44 percent of that - R2.6bn - was logged during April to June.
The debt write-off is also reflected in the section of the quarterly reports on debtors and creditors.
That section indicates that Gauteng municipalities wrote off about R3bn in bad debt during 2015/16.
That's a huge jump from the year before, when R550m was written off.
While the numbers in the debtors section do not match clearly with those in the main budget update, both sections reflect big debt write-offs.
The R3bn written off during 2015/16 was mostly for debt on water, followed by debts for rates, refuse removal and electricity.
The biggest share of this was at the City of Ekurhuleni, which wrote off R2.5bn.
Tshwane wrote off about R463m while Joburg listed nothing as written off, but logged R4.2bn as impaired debt, which effectively means it's written off.
Joburg's impaired debt was initially budgeted at R2bn for the year, then adjusted to about R3bn, then jumped to more than R4bn by the end of the year. And half of that final total was logged in the last three months of the financial year.
The Gauteng municipalities saved their budgets by cutting the “other expenditureâ€ù category down from the planned R15.6bn to R13.3bn, and cut depreciation costs from R7bn to R6bn, but overspent on “other materialsâ€ù by going from the planned R3.4bn to R4.4bn.
BAD DEBT: Pedestrians and motorists navigate their way along Wolmarans Street in Braamfontein after a pipe burst. The R3bn Gauteng municipalities wrote off during 2015/16 was mostly for debt on water, followed by debts for rates, refuse removal and electricity.
The Star