HERMANUS – The Whalecoastnews website was this week flooded by scathing comments on the Rabie administration for pushing ahead with the controversial De Mond and Lake Marina Yacht Club tenders, despite questions regarding Mayco member Clinton Lerm’s involvement with Point Caravan Resort (Pty) Ltd and the apparent lack of any public participation.
By Tuesday morning more than 120 people had commented on the subject. In most of the comments the Overstrand Municipality was criticised for a lack of transparency and consultation with regards to the two tenders.
There is a vast difference between 120 comments on social media and the same number of comments on a news website. For a news website, this is a spectacular result. It certainly points to substantial opposition to the awarding of the tenders. It was also evident in a poll we ran on the website on Monday morning. We had to take it down in the afternoon after deliberate attempts at manipulating the results. The no-for-the-tender grouping was way ahead when someone from the yes-for-the-tender group obviously decided enough was enough and started voting continuously. It was hilarious! The other grouping probably also cheated but at least they did it intelligently.
The poll was an interesting exercise and next time around we will build some fail-safes into the process to avoid manipulation. I think electronic/digital polling should become a standard tool for the Municipality to gauge the views of ratepayers on important issues. The general reaction from residents to the content and the poll on our website tie in with the growing readership of Whalecoastnews in the greater Hermanus where some of our articles/opinion pieces are now read up to 2500 times and our website visitors have grown to more than 11 000 during the past 30 days.
Judging from the comments the main concerns from residents are:
1) a lack of transparency and public participation. Why were residents not consulted in any way about the tenders? The last public participation process was more than a decade ago and the circumstances have changed dramatically. Mayor Annelie Rabie has indicated that there will be a public participation process once the Municipality receives the final site development plans from Point Caravan, which has been awarded both tenders. To many ratepayers this just doesn’t make sense. Why consult them after the fact?
2) The direct links Mayco member Clinton Lerm has with the directors of Point Caravan (Whalecoastnews reported in June that they were partners in another venture) gall many residents. While the Mayor insists that all parties did declare their interests, very few people seem to believe her. It has created mistrust and the suspicion of underhand dealings. Lerm issuing threats of legal action against anybody that dares to question him, is not exactly helping. We’ve come across a slew of people that he has threatened to sue.
3) There is also concern about the two sites being ecologically sensitive. Both are prime waterfront sites next to important estuaries. Why are these sites being commercially exploited while they should be conserved and protected? One of the interesting proposals among the comments was that the sites should be given to CapeNature to manage.
Mayor Rabie is a consummate politician, but she is playing a high-stakes political game here. Why is she seemingly prepared to alienate yet another important segment of her electorate for the sake of these tenders? She has yet to provide us with a single compelling reason why they have to be concluded now, without any input from ratepayers. The DA leadership is also curiously silent on the issue.
Without public participation the tender process will remain flawed. The Municipality took shortcuts and now wants to force the issue, hoping to just put it behind them. I suspect it won’t be that easy. Trust has been broken. The handling of these tenders was a watershed moment for the Rabie administration. They failed the test.
Trust has indeed been broken, one can forgive but few will forget!
Problem is we will never know when a second Schulphoek situation will surface. How come ratepayers do and did not even know about it? Once bitten will make it less easy to run over us all
Point 3. in the above
Schulphoek was even more ecologically sensitive with the Milkwood forest and the fine position on the peninsular …. so what happened ???