6 months on…

UPDATES in the comments section below.

…and a day, because I forgot to post this yesterday.

Remember this post, when I suggested that things are slowly but surely falling apart in the City of Cape Town. Well, here’s a good example – a pothole on a shared pavement/cycle path that I reported back on the 7th September last year.

(as long as you don’t expect a pothole filled in within 6 months) (and one day)

Looking at the email thread, I reported it to the appropriate city email address at 9:18am and received a reply:

Dear Sir
We hereby acknowledge receipt of your e-mail dated 07/09/2011
Please be advised that we have forwarded your concern to the relevant department for their action.

together with a case number, at 9:44am – a turnaround time of 26 minutes. Brilliant.

Sadly, in the intervening 263,520 minutes (yes, that took some rudimentary calculations on my part), precisely bugger all has been done about fixing said pothole.

During these minutes (each one of which I have paid my municipal rates for), I enquired why there had been no progress on the 26th September and was told:

All complaints are worked on a first come first to be served basis and on the availability of manpower and equipment. So we cannot determine or give out timeframes.

I reported the pothole again on 2nd November and got this:

Please be advised that we will follow up with the relevant department and will keep you informed of the outcome of this issue.

But they didn’t. And I had cause to report it again on 24th November after a little kid (not mine) fell off his bike having hit it.

Guess what?

Dear Sir/Madam
We hereby acknowledge receipt of your e-mail dated  2011/11/24.
Please be advised that we will follow up with the relevant department and will keep you informed of the outcome of this issue.

And guess what? They didn’t.

Yesterday marked 6 months of constant inactivity on the City’s part. If this pothole was an e-toll, millions would be vocal in support of me withholding my rates until it was scrapped. Or filled in. Whatever – you get the analogy.

I’m sure that someone will forward this to @HelenZille – even though this is a City issue and she doesn’t really have anything to do with the City. Sadly, no-one will forward it to our actual mayor, @PatriciadeLille, because we all know that that would be a complete waste of pixels.

5 thoughts on “6 months on…

  1. I’m interested in knowing if/when this particular problem is sorted out. Keep us posted?

  2. Ron > Of course.

    “Progress” thus far involved it being tweeted to two CT councillors: Dave Bryant and Brett Herron. Mr Bryant then sent me an email, which I never recieved and then had a bit of a pop at me over the weekend when I didn’t respond to the email I didn’t recieve and while I was far from the slings and arrows of outrageous cellphone signal painting with light thus.
    Upon my return to just 6000 miles from civilisation…, I have emailed Mr Bryant detailing (again) the exact location of the pothole, but at present (1430 CAT, Monday) I have had no response.

  3. OK – Mr Bryant has been in touch and Mr Herron has all the details now Including the reference number of the initial report.
    Let’s see what happens next…

  4. And the pothole was fixed yesterday, Tuesday March 13th.
    Now all that remains is finding out why it wasn’t done 6 months ago. 🙂

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