On a mission to improve service delivery, the Gansbaai – Stanford Administration was fortunate to receive an allocation of just more than R10m to buy new tractors, a digger loader, sewer tanker trucks, double cab trucks, a top of the range fire engine as well as a number of light delivery vehicles (LDV’s).
Overstrand Executive Mayor, Dudley Coetzee, officially handed over the vehicles and equipment to the Administration recently.
According to Francois Myburgh, Area Manager for Gansbaai-Stanford, his Administration has been motivating their needs for the replacement of redundant vehicles and equipment in its fleet for over a decade. “It was proven to Council that the aged fleet is becoming a risk which is detrimental to service delivery,” he said.
The majority of aged vehicles required huge amounts of money to be spent on repairs and maintenance to keep them functional.
It was found that it was not economically viable to repair the majority of these vehicles and their downtime posed a serious threat to service delivery. It was also not possible to secure the productivity and efficiency of the employees whilst they were without the basic resources to carry out their duties.
As a result, Council decided to use their multi-year budget to address the need and provision was made in the 2019/20 and 2020/21 budget and the draft budget for 2021/22 to replace/refurbish and expand the fleet of vehicles and equipment. A total amount of more than R40m was provided during the previous two financial years whilst only R5m was included in the draft 2021/22 budget.
Members of the administration were very excited and expressed their appreciation to Council for enabling them to deliver high quality services to the local community. A commitment was made that this equipment will be well looked after in future.