It was a tense moment when a municipal official halted construction on the R68 million police station in Extension 6 this week, as police invoked apartheid-era legislation to sidestep municipal bylaws.
It was a tense moment when a municipal official halted construction on the R68 million police station in Extension 6 this week, as police invoked apartheid-era legislation to sidestep municipal bylaws.
If the municipality had received plans, they would have told them where the main sewer was and the disaster earlier this year – when a sewage pipe was broken and excrement overflowed into the surrounding area – would have been avoided.
That's just one of the serious repercussions of failing to submit building plans that forced the municipality's building inspector, Clive Christian, to lay down the law and stop construction on a new, state-of-the-art police station in Extension 6 this week.
So it was High Noon on Wednesday as Christian, flanked by two other building inspectors, walked into the site office of WBHO construction foreman, Nico Groenewald. Christian handed Groenewald the notice instructing him to cease all building activities on the site and laid down the law.
"If building activities do not cease you will be served with a no-admission-of-guilt notice," he warned Groenewald. A no-admission-of-guilt notice means that a person cannot pay a penalty for the charge, but must appear in court. The notice is issued by the magistrate's court.
Discussion became heated over the question of why construction had been allowed to proceed to this point before Christian acted. While the building inspectors said they had told Groenewald numerous times to stop building activities, Groenewald said when the building inspectors visited the site, they had only made "friendly enquiries" and had not told him to stop building. Groenewald said this was the first written notification he had received from the municipality.
However, Makana Deputy Director of Planning and Land Usage, Renier van der Merwe, said that the building inspectors had served two notices. After those notices were ignored, he had instructed the inspectors to issue a no-admission-of-guilt notice.
At the police station, however, they found out that they had to bring in evidence of those two notices before a docket could be created.
However, an IT glitch meant they could not retrieve the notices. "I then instructed inspectors to issue a new notice," Van der Merwe said. Christian said Groenewald had been informed verbally not to begin construction. He'd begun regardless and disaster had ensued. "
They called us when they had hit a sewer pipe and they wanted us to fix it. If they had brought us the plans, we would have shown them where the main lines were," Christian said.
On Tuesday, Grocott's Mail published a comment from SAPS national spokesperson Colonel Vishnu Naidoo, saying they were exempt from local building regulations. Naidoo said the building of police stations was regulated the National Building Regulations and Standards Act No. 103 of 1977.
He explained that this Act stated in section 2(4), that the State was obliged to provide local authorities with drawings only for “information and content” and was under no obligation to pay for drawing examination fees.
But Makana Deputy Director of Planning and Land Usage, Renier van der Merwe, claims this apartheid-era act, amended in the 1980s, only applied to strategic high-security installations. Christian said the act had never been invoked during his tenure as building inspector.
The notice served on Groenewald reads that the municipality's Technical and Infrastructural Services office has no records of approved plans for the structure on Erf 574 in Extension 6. From their inspection, the notice continues, the structure "appears to be unauthorised and therefore constitutes a contravention [of]a section 4 (1) of the National Building Regulations Standards and Building Standards Act (Act 103 of 1977 as amended)".
Groenewald, accepting the notice, said he would pass it on to those in charge of the project. "I will now forward this to [architect]Huber Sieg and then the matter is out of my hands," he said.
