Cape Town - A long-awaited showdown between the City of Cape Town and Sanral is set to take place in court over proposed tolling in the Western Cape. “The application for secrecy that Sanral and the consortium brought to the court would have had far reaching implications for our rights to access to information and media freedom if we had left it unchallenged”, he said.
He also argued that the environment minister gave authorisation for the project to go ahead after “considering only the biophysical aspects of the proposal”. But, he said “the evidence shows that none of the decision makers considered these questions”. The base toll tax would be three times higher than Gauteng’s, at 74c per kilometre, the city says. PPC’s tender is 84 c/km including Value-Added Tax.
In lengthy papers of 7465 pages, the City details why it believes the decision to proceed with tolling was “procedurally flawed”.
It cites tourism as another potentially affected sphere: holiday locations dependent on travel along the tolled roads may suffer.
Sanral spokesman Vusi Mona said: “We are going into this trial knowing that this is not the be all and end all of tolling, and that demonising Sanral, which has a legitimate mandate from the [national] government in the rollout of a viable national road network, will not work”. Any such decision would have been recorded as a resolution, Budlender told the court, yet there is no record of such a resolution in the board’s minutes.
It will also argue that the decision of the transport minister to declare the toll was unlawful since he failed to consider the merits and impact of tolling. The decision was duly published in the Government Gazette on Alli’s sign-off.
“It required extraordinary efforts on our part, including an application to the Supreme Court of Appeal, to get to the truth of this proposed tolling project, and to be able to share that truth with the residents of Cape Town”. It’s perhaps for this reason that the City of Cape Town has been fighting tooth and nail to prevent Sanral from being implementing them in the Western Cape.
“The attitude of the city is remarkably similar to that of the applicants in the Outa (Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance) litigation (in Gauteng), who were also mistakenly of the view that they could choose to take the benefits of the enhancements of the highways without assuming the costs”, Sanral’s heads of argument states.
The Democratic Alliance and Right2Know held a protest outside the Cape High Court over Sanral’s N1/N2 tolling project. Sanral contingent liability is more than what it would cost Sanral to construct the upgrades proposed by PPC and to continue maintaining and operating the N1 and N2 freeways as it now does.
De Lille said the City “recognises that roads must be upgraded, but Sanral must speak to us so that we can find the best possible formula without it costing such a lot of money”.
