GreenCape, in partnership with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, is please to “unveil” the video showcasing the project that won the 2022 Municipal Green Economy Change Champions Showcase: The outsourcing of the operations and maintenance of the bulk water services infrastructure, which underwent major upgrades, at the Overstrand Municipality.
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE
Municipalities have been given a mandate to promote a safe and healthy environment in terms of section 152(a) of the Constitution. Local government is therefore at the centre of the development and climate challenge and there is growing recognition that local government is a critical part of the solution to address climate change. One of the challenges that municipalities are often faced with is the need to provide urgent service delivery solutions and this doesn’t always lend itself towards planning and decision making with a longer term view.
Officials at Overstrand Municipality wanted to change this approach. So when a unique opportunity presented itself, specifically the necessity to upgrade our existing bulk water services infrastructure to meet the needs of their industries and citizens, the Municipality seized on this as a chance to make improvements and invest in green technology solutions which will serve our customers for many years to come.
Over the last decade, to meet the growing demand of the community, Overstrand Municipality completed significant water services infrastructure upgrades, increasing water treatment capacity by 38%, including 4 additional plants and increasing wastewater treatment capacity by 40%.
The upgrades made by Overstrand Municipality included state-of-the-art green economy technologies; such as reverse osmosis, ultra-filtration, bio-filtration and Nereda (a specialised type of anaerobic digestion). However, these upgrades, required specialized skills that were not available internally within the municipality, to efficiently run the operations and maintenance of the upgraded infrastructure.
When a system is significantly upgraded or extended, section 77 of the Municipal Systems Act requires a municipality to review and decide on an appropriate mechanism to deliver water services in the municipality. Consequently, Overstrand Municipality resolved that a section 78 assessment be performed to determine the most appropriate mechanism to deliver water services to the municipality.
The section 78 assessment determined that the best course of action was for the water services to be delivered internally by the municipality, but with a support contract to run the operations and maintenance of the infrastructyre – this was approved by the Overstrand Municipal Council, with three parallel processes being followed to execute this outsourced support service:
- Procurement process
- Engagement with unions
- MFMA section 33 process which requires a municipality to amongst others, solicit the views and recommendations of the National Treasury and the relevant provincial treasury.
The upgrades and the O&M serve the entire Overstrand community – approximately 38 000 households, or 110 000 residents.
The project is already seeing decreases in wastewater treatment losses, improved flexibility, particularly with respect to the use of different chemicals in the water treatment process, and improved risk management and emergency response.
Additionally, it has resulted in an improvement in the Municipality’s Green Drop assessment performed by DWS, with Overstrand Municipality now rated the 3rd best Municipality in the country by that assessment (in 2022?).
Critically, as a result of this project, Overstrand Municipality has able to create 20 permanent jobs.
