Owners of units in some Johannesburg apartment blocks hit with a big increase in their council bills after their properties were rezoned and revaluated have teamed up to challenge the council in court.
Previously the city had billed them a flat rate of R250 a flat and R500 for multi-dwelling properties. They claim their properties were revalued to be worth more than the market price, thereby allowing the council to charge them higher rates.
The property revaluations drive, which started in 2017, has drawn thousands of complaints from residents and businesses who argue that the city is inflating their property values to boost its flagging income, expected to take an enormous hit from the economic downturn arising from large-scale job cuts due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The metro has said the increases or fluctuations in valuations stemmed from properties being improved, market increases and upgrades in data collection processes “relating to updated information on properties”.
The city determines and produces a general valuation roll every four years. On its website, the city says it allocates different categories to properties on the valuation roll.
“The zoning of the property determines the category that will be applied to the property. For example, if a property is zoned ‘residential’, the category will be ‘residential’ and the residential property rates tariff will be applied to that property.”
However, Chantelle Gladwin-Wood, a lawyer representing a number of clients objecting to the council’s revaluation of their property, said this has led to a number of “horror stories”.
She said most clients were from Killarney but were not limited to any specific area.
“We have people from the CBD, people from all over Joburg.
“We have been approached by a number of people. We came up with a special agreement with them that we are going to help all of them at the same time by putting all their cases together. A lot of people call this class action, but it’s not a class-action matter, it is a multiparty application,” Gladwin-Wood said.
“We are not representing everybody that is having the same problem in Joburg, that would be class action. We are only representing people who are coming to me for help.”
Gladwin-Wood said when the municipality embarked on its audit of properties around the city, it told people that they were historically charged the wrong sewer tariff.
“They have done adjustments on the affected residents where you get massive charges of anything between R16,000 up to R3.4m. It depends on many different things, like the more dwelling units at a property, the larger the adjustments will likely be,” she said.
Gladwin-Wood said one of her clients, the owner of a block of flats in Sandton, found itself owing the municipality R300,000 on a rates bill.
“This building is definitely a block of flats, it’s not multi-dwelling. But then the municipality comes and says ‘You are multi-dwelling, I’m going to change [you to that]’. We’ve got to fight them because they are billing all of us wrong. This billing [issue] is just a big mess,” she said.
Previously the city had billed them a flat rate per flat.
“[For example] a flat [was charged] R250 but multi-dwelling is R500. That’s why they get a big bill. Because previously they billed them as a flat but now they say it’s wrong [and] should have charged as a multi-dwelling so they add more to the bill for the difference,” said Gladwin-Wood.
The city was telling residents it had made a mistake by billing them the sewer tariff for a cheaper building. “They are now saying they are fixing the mistake by billing them on the expensive multi-dwelling sewer tariff.”
“It’s not wrong for the metro to correct the mistake. What is wrong is the way they went about it by assuming that sectional body corporates are multi-dwelling properties. They want to change these people from a block of flats [sectional title] to multi-dwelling because that will attract higher rates for the municipality,” said Gladwin-Wood.
In July, the municipality passed its R68.1bn budget for 2020/2021, which was lower than the R68.3bn proposed in March. The metro’s finance MMC, Jolidee Matongo, told Business Day that about 70% of the total budget is derived from rates and taxes.
Matongo’s spokesperson, Kgamanyane Stan Maphologela, said the city requires a property description and account numbers to give “a response with proper context” and subject an inquiry to a full and fair investigation.
Maphologela said the current roll was compiled with a valuation date of July 1 2017 and was implemented a year later.
“If clients were not happy with the market values, they could have objected … the objection period for the general valuation roll 2018 was opened for 45 days and closed on April 6 2018.”
He said it was the property owner’s responsibility to examine the valuation roll and determine if their property was correctly reflected on it.
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