Pretoria - Homeowners whose erroneous municipal bills were corrected, and those given a chance to pay what they could afford, still did not want to pay.
Instead, they continued to label the City of Tshwane as uncaring, according to MMC for finance Peter Sutton.
He was replying to the threat of a shutdown by members of the Lotus Gardens, Atteridgeville and Saulsville Civic Association, who accused the City of being unwilling to assist struggling homeowners.
The organisation said it was frustrated because it had reached an agreement with the City to pilot an intervention programme that started in Atteridgeville to correct erroneous bills.
In terms of the arrangement, qualifying homeowners would be placed on the indigent list while allowing those with limitations to pay based on an affordability assessment.
They felt that the City was simply forcing people to make payment arrangements through its debt collector agencies and ward councillors despite some homeowners being in the process of being placed on the indigent list.
They said others were simply not offered an opportunity to prove what they could afford based on the affordable assessment.
However, speaking to the Pretoria News yesterday, Sutton said it was indeed true that an agreement was reached to have an intervention programme because there was a good relationship between the City and the association.
He said the truth was that when it came down to people putting their hands in their pockets to pay the city, there was reluctance.
“The agreement was for a billing intervention and make sure that where people are qualified for the indigent programme, they were registered for it. Secondly, it was for the City to correct accounts where there was a problem. The third one was that once the accounts have been fixed, people needed to pay them.
“What has been happening was that people have not been paying, but if they could not pay they needed to apply for the affordability programme, which is a standard programme we have in the City where they could have partial or full debt write-off. However, they needed to pay the account.
“It seems what is happening at the moment is that we go and we fix the accounts, but when it comes to payments again, people are not happy; they do not want to pay.”
Pretoria News