The City of Cape Town is no closer to finding out what motorists are expected to pay should e-tolls be implemented.
|||Cape Town - A “haystack” of documents involving the N1 and N2 toll roads project has brought the City of Cape Town no closer to finding out what motorists are expected to pay in toll fees.
In May, the Western Cape High Court put a temporary stop to the R10 billion project.
It also ordered that the SA National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) hand over certain documents, including a toll strategy report and a financial analysis report.
Now, six months later, the city is expected to again approach the court because of a dispute over documents.
It is expected to approach Deputy Judge President Jeanette Traverso in chambers on Wednesday afternoon for a procedural directive to resolve the ongoing dispute.
The city believes the public is entitled to a full disclosure of the financial implications of the project, such as how much it is going to cost, its viability and what motorists will pay in tariffs.
The city’s attorney, Cormac Cullinan, said that so far they’d been piled with a “haystack” of information, most of which was irrelevant.
Some of the information was merely “pages and pages” of data that had to do with traffic numbers.
Cullinan said they received dozens of files on Wednesday. In a statement by the city’s mayoral committee member for transport Brett Herron, he said their attorneys received 48 files from Sanral.
He attributed the “sudden arrival of documents” to the fact that the parties’ had a court meeting today.
Cullinan said: “What we want is the information the decision-makers would have had, none of which has been made available to us. We’re yet to get financial information such as how much the toll project is going to cost and what people are going to pay. We say that information had to have been before the decision-makers otherwise they would not have been able to make a fully-informed decision.”
Another point of contention was that Sanral had withheld certain documents it considered to be confidential.
According to Herron, these included bid documents of the consortium selected as the “preferred bidder” for the 30-year concession contract to operate the toll roads.
Sanral’s plan is to toll sections of the N1 and N2 highways in the Winelands.
While the court’s interim interdict has for now prevented any agreement relating to the declaration of the toll road project from being concluded, the city is ultimately seeking a judicial review of the decision to declare the highways toll roads.
The review, the preparation for which the city’s lawyers require the documents, is yet to come before the court.
“The city believes that the people of Cape Town and surrounding areas are entitled to a full disclosure of the financial implications of the proposed N1/N2 Winelands toll project,” Herron said in his statement.
“The city will make every effort to ensure that this happens and to avoid the situation being experienced in Gauteng, where the financial impacts on the public were only revealed after the toll roads had been constructed.”
leila.samodien@inl.co.za
Cape Times