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 2010
   Buffalo City on 2010
General Valuations Breakfast Meeting

Regent Hotel -27 February 2008

Welcome Address by Executive Mayor Cllr. Zintle Peter

Ntombentle Peter

Mr. Programme Director Councillor Dickson Matika, fellow citizens of Buffalo City, honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen; I greet you all this morning and welcome you to this launch of the Buffalo City General Valuations project.

I welcome you with a sense of relief that we are eventually kick-starting this important process, and that we are doing this jointly as the public and private sector of Buffalo City.

There is generally not much that I personally can say about the General Valuations project except that it is a legitimate process that will assist us as the Buffalo City municipal community to observe and honour the provisions of the Local Government Municipal Property Rates Act of 2004.

Basically, what this Act seeks to do is to set guidelines and parameters for a municipality to value and rate immovable properties within its area of jurisdiction.

The Act also seeks to revoke the skewed and unfair valuation systems and procedures of the past, where the focus was primarily on the geographic location of the property and not its individual value.

The General Valuations project will therefore assist us as the municipality to arrive at fair and equitable valuations of households and business properties.

Another significant improvement occurs in the fact that farms will now also be evaluated and taxed like other business properties, thus removing the thorny element of discrimination and partiality when dealing with the local commercial sector.

I have been informed that data collectors and evaluators will be visiting households and business properties respectively as from today, and that this process should be completed by July 2009. There are approximately 160,000 properties within Buffalo City which will need to be valued within this period. This is a mammoth task, and one that will require the participation and cooperation of all concerned.

I therefore take this opportunity to appeal to our business and farming communities and household property owners to avail themselves for this important chapter in our local development agenda.

I invite you to exercise your right to be heard and to play a significant role in deciding the future of Buffalo City and its citizens.

I myself will be subjected to the valuations process as a citizen and ratepayer of Buffalo City. I have a legal duty to avail myself for the process and to respond positively to the requirements of the Law.

I therefore find it incumbent upon me to allay whatever fears or suspicions that we as diverse interest groups might harbour against this process, and to reassure you that it is not in any way meant to bring pressure to bear on any specific interest group.

As I have already intimated, this is not an exclusively Buffalo City programme but is a national obligation that we have to honour and respect.

We will continue to plough the money collected from rates back into city development and our ongoing programme to create a better life for all in Buffalo City.

I will now make way for the technical team to educate us more on the General Valuations programme, and I invite everybody to partake freely in the subsequent plenary discussions.

Your contributions will decide both the impetus and the success of this project.

I thank you.



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