Cape Town - Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis made two major announcements at a gathering in Milnerton that relates to the city’s waterways.
The City’s waterways have been under a microscope over the past year, with numerous challenges, and calls for transparency around its water quality data.
Hill-Lewis announced the formation of an advisory committee on the quality and cleanliness of Cape Town’s rivers, vleis and waterways.
The new Water Quality in Wetlands and Waterways Advisory Committee was approved by City Council last week and the key aspect of this committee was the involvement of water activists and interested residents.
“Cape Town has a dedicated community of water activists and experts. Some of them have worked on these issues tirelessly for years.
The committee, previously called the Water Resilience Committee, was reconstituted to bring together water industry experts, city councillors, community activists, and interested residents. They will report to the Mayoral Committee twice a year.
“The committee is created to bring water activists and experts from across the city together to recommend strategies to mitigate water pollution and ensure the long-term protection and restoration of wetlands and waterways in Cape Town,” Hill-Lewis said.
Mayor Hill-Lewis will be chairperson of the committee, and councillor Alex Lansdowne, an experienced botanist and conservationist, was appointed deputy chairperson to manage the committee and lead its functioning.
Spatial Planning and Environment Mayco member Eddie Andrews, Water and Sanitation Mayco member Zahid Badroodien, councillor Maryam Manuel would serve as members from the City.
Other members ranged from aquatic ecologist Liz Day to Milnerton Residents’ Association member and water activist Caroline Marx.
Hill-Lewis said there was a systematic plan to address the quality of the City’s waterways, which consisted of 1 910km of rivers and streams and 4 164 natural and semi-natural wetlands, including our vleis and estuaries.
Water and Sanitation Mayco member Zahid Badroodien said: “The river systems in Cape Town can unlock social, economic and environmental opportunities for the City.
“The department is serious about water quality, and we have launched the Mayoral Priority Programme on Sanitation that will see pump stations, reticulation systems, Wastewater Treatment Works (WWTW), and catchments benefit from projects that will deliver cleaner river ways over the course of the term.”
Some of the challenges the City faced in cleaning waterways ranged from WWTW discharging treated effluent into the natural ecosystems, sewage overflow and surcharge, illegal sewage connections into storm water systems and illegal industrial discharge among others.
Heeding the call by the public for more transparency, Hill-Lewis also announced there would now be an open and transparent approach to sharing the City’s water quality data for the public through its Open Data Portal.
“In the past, the perception has been that the City is unwilling to share information around water quality because it is not readily accessible to the public, with the infrequency of analysis of Portfolio Committee reports not being sufficiently useful either.
“This has created a scenario where stakeholders source data through other means about the quality of various water bodies in and around the City, and have had no means to compare independent data with the city’s data,” Hill-Lewis said.
He said the new Open Data Portal sought to address this shortcoming.
The data from the City’s Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) would be automatically uploaded onto the Open Data Portal to ensure integrity.
The data can be found here: https://odp-cctegis.opendata.arcgis.com/documents/inland-water-quality/about
“Both of these announcements will build on these relationships by drawing the activist and expert community right into the heart of our government’s plans to clean up these waterways.
“Activists and experts who have struggled to access data before, will now see data in full, freely available on our open data portal, and without any of the restrictive terms of use that were applied in the past,” Hill-Lewis said.