Council last week that were both important and exasperating. One is that the council suspended the new municipal manager.
I can almost hear you groan. The other is that the Knysna N2 bypass was raised again after more than 40 years of back and forth proposals and rejections of where it should go and whether Knysna wanted it or not. I cannot get my head around the endless problems with the position of municipal manager at Knysna. What gives? Grant Easton resigned from this position in 2017 while he was facing a disciplinary hearing on misconduct charges. His successor, Kam Chetty, had hardly been there when he suddenly resigned in August 2018. The then mayor said he was “not surprised”. Dr Sitembele Vatala started in April 2019. This week the council put him on “precautionary suspension” while it probed allegations against him. What they are, we are not told, except that he has not been charged with any misconduct. So we are back to yet another acting municipal manager: Dr Michelle Gratz, a medical doctor and former municipal manager of Mossel Bay. She won accolades for clean audits and heading one of the 10 best-managed municipalities in the country, so good to have that kind of hand on the tiller. But seriously, how can a town prosper, let alone be properly managed, if it cannot sort out its leadership? Is that too much to ask? Then there is the N2 bypass. Yes, that old chestnut. Officials asked councillors to support a recommendation that the municipal manager “engage with SANRAL” to determine the current status of the bypass and where the municipality could assist. The N2 bypass, designed to take the national road traffic out of Knysna, was proposed back in the 1970s. It was opposed by environmentalists and by local businesses, which believed they would lose passing custom. (As one man quipped: ‘You mean that truck driver won’t stop to buy that pie anymore?’). There were several bypass proposals over the years, but they got nowhere. Sanral’s more recent proposed route would take the N2 from the Buffalo Bay turnoff, north of Knysna, to rejoin the existing N2 at Brakenhill. But that route can no longer be used because some of the land earmarked for the road has gone to housing. Sanral will have to buy new land and there will have to be new environmental impact studies. The many specialist studies already done are now out of date. The bulk of freight moves around South Africa by road. The heavy trucks that roar through Knysna now will increase, and so will the noise, pollution, damage to roads and danger to pedestrians. A passing truck killed a pedestrian last year. Knysna needs a bypass. There will be negative impacts, of course – but these have to be weighed against the negative impact of doing nothing, of allowing the congestion, noise, pollution and danger to pedestrians to increase. A bypass may be expensive in monetary terms, but the non-monetary spin-offs are far greater.
