It looks like the City of Cape Town has won out over the national Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS), with the City announcing new water restrictions and tariffs to be implemented from October 1.

The City had been pushing for the changes to be put in place earlier, but DWS had rejected those changes around two weeks ago.

That’s good news for Capetonians who have been counting the costs of the increased tariffs each month, but let’s start with the water usage changes via News24:

The key elements of Level 5 restrictions are as follows:

• An increase in the personal water use limit from 50 litres per person per day to 70 litres per person per day.
• A resetting of the overall City water usage target from 450 million litres per day to 500 million litres per day
• A relaxation of restrictions for commercial and industrial water users from a 45% to a 40% usage reduction
• A lowering of tariffs

An extra 20 litres per day per person, pal.

Here’s a wild idea – continue to save water, as we have been doing, and we may even make it through a summer or two intact.

Residential tariffs (excluding VAT)

• 0 – 6 kL: Down from R28.90/kL to R21,19 kL
• 6 – 10,5 kL: Down from R46/kL to R34,43/kL
• 10 – 35 kL: Down from R120,27 to R52,39/kL
• Above 34k L: Down from R1 000/kL to R300/kL

If you were using 50 litres per day, and you have four people in your house, that’s 6 kilolitres per month. You’ll now see a saving of around R30 – hey, it’s a start.

Commercial and industrial tariffs

• Down from R45,75/kL to R37,50/kL

Maybe that saving will be passed onto consumers. Then again, with the price of petrol set to soar by around R1,15 a litre from October 1, maybe not.

Here’s Executive Director of Informal Settlements, Water and Sanitation Gisela Kaise with a word of warning:

“At Level 6B, our overall target was 450 million litres a day – we never reached it. We are now at around 500 million litres a day. The ideal situation is to stay at 500 million litres, which is still our target under Level 5,” she said.

“We are not encouraging people to use more, but with the 500 million litres comes a different target. People are already using more than 50 litres per day, we are just charging the right price now to come in overall at 500 million litres per day.”

Our dam levels are now nearing 70% (Friday’s figures from the City of Cape Town showed 67,9% full), which is a significant improvement from this time last year.

One more time for those at the back – no, you can’t be cracking a bath when you feel like it.

[source:news24]